A B.C. Supreme Court Justice has ruled lightning, not a logging contractor's equipment, sparked a major summer 2010 forest fire southeast of Vanderhoof.
The provincial government had brought legal action against Canadian Forest Products and a subcontractor, Barlow Lake Logging Ltd., following the Greer Creek fire.
It had burned through 6,100 ha, took several weeks to extinguish and cost the province $5.5 million in damages related to fire suppression, reforestation, lost stumpage revenue and lost value to immature timber.
One of Barlow's feller bunchers was seen parked nearby when a Wildfire Management Branch plane flew overhead and spotted a small fire during the late afternoon of June 18, 2010.
By then, the last of the Barlow workers had left the site, and none had noticed any indication of the blaze before leaving, Justice Bruce Greyell found in a ruling issued last week.
The first time-and-date-stamped photo of the fire was taken about an hour after the workers had left.
The province asserted the feller buncher was the cause based on its close proximity and the machinery's reputation for causing fires. But Greyell found there was no evidence to support the position and that there was a "fair inference to be drawn" the blaze was a "holdover fire" caused by lightning the evening before.
Greyell also found an early shutdown was not required, noting in part that there was a significant downpour the evening before according to Barlow employees. And while Barlow workers failed to maintain a fire watch for a full one-hour after ceasing operations, Greyell found it unlikely the fire would have reached the "stage of flaming ignition," where it would have been seen from the ground, by the time the hour was up.
Conversely, Greyell found Canfor failed to establish that the province's effort to combat the fire were a "substantial departure from the principles of firefighting."
Just 0.1-0.2 ha in size when first seen, the fire had grown to 50 ha overnight and was burning mostly through stands of highly-flammable beetle killed pine. It triggered an evacuation alert for about 30 homes in the area and at one point more than 200 firefighters were working the blaze.
