Last week, I outlined one thing that I feel is important enough to our local area, our entire valley, that it should be an issue in the upcoming local elections, and that’s fire protection. And when I say ‘fire protection,’ the natural thing to think about is local volunteer fire departments, which are the main way that we have tried to protect local buildings when they catch fire.
Along that line of thought, Joy Guyot responded to me on Facebook, essentially saying that in addition to thinking of more fire protection in conventional terms, we should also recognize what has been accomplished locally in that respect. And, of course, she is right; we should recognize what has been done in the past, as well as looking to the future.
My whole concern, and I maybe didn’t explain it as well as I should have last week, does not have to do only, and not primarily, with conventional fire protection. It has to do with the serious risk that climate change has brought to our area.
I’m not a thousand years old, but my memory goes well back to the 1950’s and ’60’s. I never recall an area suffering catastrophic fires as we have seen in recent years. There may well have been some, but I can’t remember a town being evacuated, much less having losses like the ones I cited last week.
But after all the serious losses we have seen in western Canada over the last few years, it seems to me that we need to raise our fire protection thoughts up a level, and accept that local communities and areas, in our case, Golden and Area ‘A’, should, for our own protection, become more involved with forest fires. It doesn’t seem that forest fires are going to go away.
It’s been the practice of most communities in western Canada to leave serious firefighting to the provinces, and with most of our land base being forested, that has made sense. But this is no longer the ’50’s and ’60’s, and whether the cause of the recent increase in fires is climate change or something else, we all know that there have been many more fires in recent years, and if we can do something as a community to assist the province in dealing with fires, I would think we should do so. It seems obvious that the task of dealing with fires may well be more than the province can handle, and if it cannot protect the whole province, various areas in the path of fires will suffer the consequences.
And we know the provinces have not been able to deal effectively with fires. Just drive through Jasper and Fort Mac in Alberta, and Boston Bar and now Clinton in BC, and Kelowna in the past, and the list goes on. And the list gets more meaningful when we drive between Golden and Parson and see the mountains on the west side of the valley and all the acreage of burnt forest. And the only thing that kept us off the list of the towns that have suffered serious losses is the fact that the wind died down. As it was, we still lost several homes, but if the wind had continued, it could have been much worse.
So what do we do about it?
Well, we can do nothing. That’s what most towns and areas will do.
Or we can do something, and it could well start with someone being elected, or someone who gets re-elected, becoming interested in the issue and doing something to deal with it. It would take some work, there’s no doubt about that, but it could be a very significant body of work which could end up saving some or much of our area one day.
The first thing to do would be some research to find out what could be done. That could yield nothing, but just think if it yielded something that could help us in the future, and give us some peace of mind through the years. I don’t know about you, but when the thunder and lightning start, as they did the other night, the danger of forest fires seems pretty near.
And there might be communities in other places that have done some effective things to reduce danger from catastrophic fires. Maybe in Canada, maybe in Sweden, maybe in Idaho, maybe in the Czech Republic. But until someone becomes interested and actually does the research, be it online or otherwise, sends some emails, makes some phone calls and digs into it a bit, we’ll never know. Who are better people to do that than our locally elected officials? And what could an elected person do that might be a better contribution to our area?
Solutions may include new levels of fire protection thought, but it may well also include a combination of new approaches plus links to the traditional fire protection as well.
I would think, and hope, that someone may be interested.
