Prince George residents should look north to Hudson's Hope and wonder when it will be this city's turn.
With so many residents living in or near heavily forested areas on the outskirts of the city and in the regional district, the only question is when, not if, there will ever be a catastrophic fire to hit this immediate area. When that day comes, residents will flee from a fire that will consume thousands of hectares of forest and dozens of homes. It is as inevitable a natural disaster for Prince George as a deadly hurricane is to hit Florida or a major earthquake to strike southern California. It might not happen until next year or next century but it will occur.
With so many local residents living in what forest firefighters call interface areas - homes and neighbourhoods next to or surrounded by dense bush - Prince George is at serious risk.
The city has taken numerous steps, especially in the wake of the mountain pine beetle epidemic, to clear dead trees and underbrush in vulnerable areas across the city. While that reduces the risk, there is no denying that Prince George is surrounded by plenty of the fuel needed for a significant forest fire.
As of Thursday afternoon, the only barrier separating the town of Hudson's Hope from the Mount McAllister blaze was the Peace River. A stiff breeze and some hot embers cast high into the air from the power of the fire are all that's needed to cross that obstacle. As both this fire, the huge blazes in the Northwest Territories and past B.C. forest fires show, northern latitudes do not offer any protection, nor do rivers, lakes, hills, mountains or proximity to urban areas.
The Okanagan Valley is filled with beautiful lakes and dotted with well-irrigated orchards, vineyards and golf courses. That didn't stop the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire from becoming the worst interface forest fire in B.C. history, according to the B.C. Wildfire Management Branch. By the time it was over, the fire covered 256 square kilometres on the east side of Okanagan Lake, between Penticton and Kelowna, destroying or damaging 238 homes and forcing the evacuation of more than 33,000 people.
The Silver Creek fire near Salmon Arm in 1998 burned 55 square kilometres of forest. I was one of the 7,000 people that had to evacuate Salmon Arm. A lightning strike started the fire in a steep canyon in the Fly Hills. Too steep to reach on foot and impossible for aerial crews to extinguish with retardant and water, the fire was little more than a distant nuisance for two weeks until an afternoon in early August when heavy winds turned the flames into an inferno that raced across the valley and up Mount Ida. Residents in the immediate area were given minutes to evacuate with little more than the clothes on their backs.
The news that Wednesday's fire in L.C. Gunn Park in Prince George was arson is particularly worrisome. Fortunately, local crews responded quickly and conditions allowed them to control the blaze.
Sadly, that wasn't the case with the Garnet forest fire near Penticton, which was intentionally set 20 years ago this Sunday by the son of a firefighter. That fire also stubbornly burned for days, eluding the best efforts of ground and air crews to control it. One of my most prized personal possessions is a black-and-white photograph I took of a forest firefighter, pausing for a moment to drink a bottle of water. He's looking to the sky, hoping for relief, with smoke and flames directly behind him.
A few days after I took the picture, he and his colleagues dropped their tools and ran. As in Salmon Arm, gusting winds created massive sheets of fire that raged across the mountainside. No one was hurt but 3,500 people were evacuated and 18 homes were destroyed, one of them belonging to a colleague of mine at the Penticton Herald.
The fire left nothing of Len's house but the nearby shop, where he liked to work on cars in his spare time, was miraculously untouched.
Prince George has been kept untouched to this point but residents shouldn't interpret that good luck as proof it will never happen here. Instead, they should be ready for the day when the fire comes to their doorstep and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
