The sky on that Friday morning last August was a bright, bright yellow. I went outside to find my neighbours milling about on their driveways and pointing to smoke billowing above the hills to the north. Close to 10 pm the night before, the McDougall Creek wildfire had jumped the lake and started two new fires—the Walroy Lake wildfire in Kelowna, and the Clarke Creek wildfire in Lake Country, where I live. Together, the three fires were labelled the Grouse Complex. Now the Clarke Creek wildfire was heading straight for my neighbourhood.
No one panicked, but everyone began the process of loading pets, suitcases and keepsakes into their vehicles. Some of us put lawn sprinklers on our roofs. Long before the police came through our subdivision, pounding on doors and ordering people to evacuate, most of us were packed and gone. I was one of 35,000 people to leave. Later that same day, as the fire worsened, smoke filled the valley, the Kelowna Airport was closed, and first responders began heading for the Okanagan from around the province, across the country and even from distant parts of the globe.
The power of the patch
The problem, however, began decades before the summer of 2023. Much of it has to do with the way we have managed—or mismanaged—our forests. According to Paul Hessburg, Senior Research Ecologist, Pacific Northwest Research Station, our forests used to be much more ‘patchy.’ As he notes in a TEDx talk titled “Living Dangerously in an Era of Megafires,” the forest fires that have historically been part of the natural environment were smaller, more localized, and less intense because of what he has dubbed ‘the power of the patch’.
Now, those patches have been connected with flammable development, but also by more forest. Our emphasis on fire suppression has been so successful that forests across the United States and Canada have filled in with a dense mat of trees that often touch one another. The lack of intermittent, small fires has also clogged the forest floor with dead and dying trees—fuel for larger fires. Moreover, the forest floor has become filled with a ‘duff’ layer of pine needles and dead grass. This duff layer not only acts as kindling, but also inhibits the growth of the fire-resistant grasses that used to grow between the trees.
All of this means that when fires do occur, they are massive, intense and volatile.
John Betts is the Executive Director of the Western Forestry Contractors’ Association, an industry association headquartered in Nelson, BC, that represents tree planters, contract wildfire fighters and independent forestry consultants. He frequently works with regulatory bodies to increase public safety and awareness. “We are learning,” he says, “that fire-adapted forests are dynamic. They rely on fire to maintain themselves. When we suppress fire, as we have now done for decades, we change their structure and composition. These ecosystems are now so out of composure they burn with far more destructive intensity and severity.”
Betts notes that many of the fires we are currently experiencing are “crown fires,” which occur in the tops of the trees, rather than “grass fires,” which burn on the forest floor and are much less dangerous, because they’re neither as high, nor as hot. As he notes, “There is now enough fuel and enough trees to keep the fire in the crowns.” He explains that, “It’s a question of flame length, or the height of the flames. The crowns can’t carry the fire unless there’s enough energy coming up from the floor. We need to bring the fire down to the ground, and then deny it fuel.”
Particularly spectacular—and deadly—is when a tree “candles,” or bursts into flames. When multiple trees candle, they can create a crown front. Fires are ranked from 1 to 6, with a rank 6 fire being the most intense. Rank 4 and above is when the crown is involved. Fortunately, the fires in Kelowna and Lake Country never rose above a rank 4, but the McDougall Creek fire may have achieved rank 6 in the forest and rank 5 in built-up areas.
While climate change is not the root cause of these fires, it has exacerbated the situation with droughts, higher temperatures, higher winds, and the migration northward of insects such as the pine beetle, which have killed thousands of trees that are then added to the forest floor. As such, climate change has extended the fire season by 40 to 80 days.
The result is enormous fires. In the past, the Clarke Creek fire in Lake Country at 373 hectares and the Walroy Lake fire in Kelowna at 733 hectares would have been considered large fires. But these were dwarfed by the immensity of the McDougall Creek fire, at 13,970 hectares. In 2023 alone, 61 fires burned a total of 71,971 hectares—or 720 square kilometres, an area larger than the city of Toronto—in the Penticton Zone, which runs from the American border to Lake Country.
From wildfires to interface fires
The AEC industry needs to pay attention, in order to avoid seeing our work go up in smoke. According to Hessberg, “more than 60 percent of all new housing starts [in the United States] are being built in this flammable and dangerous mess.” As Betts puts it, “We have energized the landscape and put our infrastructure at risk.” As I drove down Highway 97 to stay at my son’s house in Kelowna and watched the smoke rising from my neighbourhood, I really didn’t have much hope that my house would be standing the next day.
When a fire is burning away from human settlements, it is described as a wildfire. But when that wildfire approaches people and structures, it becomes a wildfire-urban interface fire, or simply, an interface fire. Wildfires and interface fires have their own unique characteristics, and are often fought by different kinds of firefighters. Craig Moore is the owner of Rider Ventures, an Indigenous-owned company with a focus on fire and flood protection. He’s a structural firefighter, which means he usually deals with buildings and infrastructure, rather than wildfires. This year alone, throughout the province, his company has protected 3,500 homes with only three losses—one of which was an outhouse. “The nemesis of a structural firefighter,” he explains, “are the little nooks and crannies of a building where embers can get trapped underneath building materials.” Embers are a formidable nemesis. They can easily jump or “embercast” two to five kilometres, and with a good wind, they’ve been known to travel up to 16 kilometres.
Structural fires burn differently from wildfires. Wildfires move quickly through a forest at 23 kilometres per hour or more, depending on factors such as the wind. But structures, such as our homes, can burn for over 24 hours. As our communities become denser, structures larger than houses are also at risk. Jason Brolund is the Fire Chief for West Kelowna, which was particularly hard hit by the McDougall Creek fire, with 70 homes affected by the fire. As he notes, “I never thought I would be protecting an apartment building in an interface fire.” They saved that building and hundreds of others, including a newly completed water treatment plant. His experience points to the kind of fires we may encounter with greater frequency in the future.
Sadly, the Okanagan is no stranger to fires large or small. Two decades earlier, the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire consumed close to 26,000 hectares of forest. During the 2017 Nighthawk fire, the evacuation alert line was right along my back fence. I had my car packed, but that time, I did not have to evacuate.
Getting FireSmart about buildings
Yet there is hope. Everyone I spoke with emphasized the importance of programs such as FireSmart, which sets out construction and maintenance guidelines for increasing the fire-resilience of buildings. Larry Watkinson, the Fire Chief for Kelowna, even went so far as to say, “The FireSmart principles are a game changer. They’re the most important thing a homeowner can do.”
FireSmart Canada was founded in 1993, and includes programs designed to engage not only homeowners, but also local governments, Nations, children, and homebuilders. “Homebuilders,” says Rachel Woodhurst, Program Lead for FireSmart BC, “are one of the most critical pieces of the FireSmart puzzle.” This is because decisions made during construction—particularly in terms of materials—can be critical in ensuring that a house is resistant to wildfires. This means encouraging the use of materials such as fibre cement siding rather than vinyl siding or cedar shakes; shingles that are rated Class A (which is the highest level of fire resistance); and even energy efficient windows (which are also more fire resistant). Details, too, are critical. External vents in homes, for example, should be covered with non-flammable screens to prevent embers getting into the attic.
The landscape around a building is also important. Locating easily combustible cedar hedges and juniper bushes close to your house is, according to Chief Watkinson, “like placing a blowtorch next to your home.” Wooden fences and woodpiles, if too near to a building, clogged gutters, and a yard full of pine needles can all be equally dangerous. Woodhurst noted, “90% of the risk to your home is in the roof and what’s directly against the house.” At the same time, FireSmart suggests that trees anywhere on your property should be spaced three metres apart, and be trimmed so that no branches are less than two metres above the ground.
Given that FireSmart Home Assessments are free in British Columbia, it seems a service that every homeowner in a forested area should take advantage of. In writing this article, I learned that my house—with cedar shakes, vinyl siding, juniper bushes and over two dozen large, untrimmed pine trees—would probably be classified as “fire stupid.” Nonetheless, on Saturday morning, the day after I evacuated following the fire warning last summer, one of my neighbours shared photographs from their security camera that showed my house was still standing. The sense of relief I felt was overwhelming.
Other forms of infrastructure can also make a difference. Burying utility lines underground is one positive step municipalities can take. As Watkinson says, “Power poles can fall and compromise aboveground operations. We need to get things in the ground, so we can work above.” The McDougall Creek fire destroyed over 400 power poles and more than 25 kilometres of power lines, leaving 1,200 people without electricity.
Firefighting heroes
While every firefighter I spoke to praised the FireSmart program, there is no escaping the fact that the hundreds of first responders who descended on the Valley were the real heroes who saved thousands of homes in the McDougall Creek fire. On the east side of the lake, only three homes and two outbuildings burned in Kelowna, and only three homes and one detached garage were destroyed in Lake Country. The west side of Lake Okanagan suffered most: 70 homes were affected in West Kelowna, 20 were lost in the Westbank First Nation, and approximately 100 structures were destroyed in the Trader Cover and Okanagan Resort areas—including the historic Okanagan Resort itself. But as Darren Lee, Fire Chief for Lake Country said, “It could have been so much worse.” By comparison, the 2017 Nighthawk fire in Lake Country covered only 55 hectares but destroyed eight homes, and the Okanagan Mountain Park fire in 2003 burned 239 homes.
It is also little short of a miracle that there was no loss of life. All of this is a tribute to the crews who worked day and night to protect our communities and ourselves. In one extraordinary example, someone posted a video from their security cam of police fighting backyard fires with garden hoses.
The combination of social media and security cameras provided ongoing, accurate, and sometimes unsettling information about the fires. On Sunday, one of my neighbours posted an image of firefighters in their backyard, while another showed flames burning to the edge of a road near my house. At the same time, websites livestreamed the daily press conferences that began on Monday, and provided links to interactive maps that showed areas under evacuation alerts.
Over the life of these fires, firefighters came from all over British Columbia and Canada, while others arrived from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. But in the first 24 hours of the inferno, it was only the local fire departments that were available to fight the blaze.
Brent Penner, Deputy Fire Chief Lake Country, provided me with a detailed description of the personnel and equipment involved in fighting the Clarke Creek fire. On that first Friday they had 12 vehicles fighting the fire—a mix of fire engines, tenders or water trucks, bush trucks (for rough terrains) and ATVs. The firefighting crew included 47 on-call members from the community and eight career firefighters.
On Saturday, the City of Kelowna was covered in a thick blanket of smoke, the airport remained closed, and travel to the valley was banned. The Air Quality Health Index rose to 11 indicating a Very High Risk—the top of the scale. I foolishly went outside for a few moments, and immediately became short of breath.
As the weekend wore on and the fire ramped up, equipment and personnel poured in and the totals rose to 26 vehicles with 82 personnel—and these were only the ones fighting the structural fires in Lake Country. In Kelowna, there were upwards of 500 structural firefighters on the ground by Day 2 of the Walroy Lake fire. Overhead, small planes, water tankers and helicopters helped to direct and lessen the intensity of the fires, for instance by slinging “mud” (fire retardant) along ridgelines.
The cost of wildfires
I mention these developments in detail because they emphasize how much time, effort, equipment and money are involved in a fighting these fires. Across the province, between April 1 and October 31 of last year, there were 2,245 wildfires, which burned 2.84 million hectares of land. While the final numbers are still coming in, the provincial government estimates that it will have spent close to $1 billion in 2023 fighting wildfires—a staggering $762 million over the budgeted amount. And that’s just the beginning. The McDougall Creek fire alone caused over $480 million in insured damage. Just north of the Okanagan in the Shuswap area, the Bush Creek East wildfire, which was burning at the same time, destroyed 270 structures and caused an additional $240 million in insured damage.
The Insurance Bureau of Canada has declared the BC wildfires of 2023 to be the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the province, and the 10th costliest natural disaster in the history of Canada. The costliest natural disaster was also a wildfire—the one that consumed Fort McMurray in 2016 and cost $4.3 billion in insurance claims.
Sadly, much of this would never have occurred if we had taken action earlier. As Betts says, “We are grappling with the inertia of the status quo.” After the fires of 2003, British Columbia commissioned the “Firestorm 2003: Provincial Review,” which recommended better forest management procedures, removal of fuel hazards, and community fireproofing programs. It took another series of disasters in 2017 and another report (“Addressing the New Normal: 21st Century Disaster Management in British Columbia”) with many of the same recommendations before things began to change in earnest.
Mitigation measures do take place across the province, and they continue apace today. The province allows for both Indigenous cultural burning, which has been practiced for centuries for both cultural and environmental reasons, and prescribed fires, which are aimed at replacing catastrophic wildfires with more frequent, less intense fires. Both kinds of fires reduce the accumulation of forest fuels.
These methods can be effective. Southwest of Kamloops, Logan Lake (pop. 2,000) is a pioneer in wildfire mitigation. It was recognized as Canada’s first FireSmart Community in 2013, and the measures implemented there, a combination of prescribed burns and preventative maintenance, are widely credited with saving the town from the Tremont Creek wildfire, which burned 63,500 hectares in 2021. Typically, communities receive a few hundred thousand dollars from the provincial government for such measures—this, of course, pales in comparison to the cost of a major wildfire.
Becoming stewards
Even with mitigation measures, however, the danger will not go away. As Chief Lee warns, “As our community grows, the risk grows. We need to become stewards of the land.” The fact is, that we live in a region where fire is an inevitable—and even necessary. It’s part of our ecosystem, and we need to design our homes and infrastructure accordingly.
On Friday, August 25th, I was allowed to return home. The same day, the airport was reopened. My neighbourhood was intact, but driving northward I passed many charred and burnt trees, and a number of destroyed structures. My home was untouched, but there were large, muddy boot prints on my back porch that showed how close the fire had come. Firefighters had thrown flammable items from the porch, such as chair cushions, into my backyard and away from my house. On October 18th, all the fires in the Grouse Complex were officially declared to be out. Hiking around my neighbourhood that month, I noticed that new grass had already begun to sprout, and deer and other wildlife had returned to burned out areas.
Future fires, if not completely avoidable, can be effectively mitigated and greatly reduced in terms of cost and damage through inexpensive preventative measures. To achieve this, however, many different disciplines need to begin cooperating. As Lee says, “Fire departments and the forest service can’t do it by themselves. Builders, architects and developers need to be integrated into the system to make it work better for everybody.”
Dr. Douglas MacLeod, FRAIC, is the Chair of the RAIC Centre for Architecture at Athabasca University.
As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine