‘Primed to burn:’ Former Parks Canada forestry scientist fears the worst for Banff

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Banff is losing the race to prevent the type of disastrous wildfire that torched much of the town of Jasper, says a former Parks Canada environmental scientist.

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The failure over decades to properly manage forests to protect the town of Banff doesn’t bode well for the survival of the busy mountain mecca, said Dr. Cliff White, who retired as environmental science manager for Banff National Park in 2009.

“It’s just so primed to burn, you can’t stop it – I don’t think Banff has time…Banff and Canmore are equally vulnerable and it’s a matter that we really need to get our heads around,” said White, now an environmental consultant with various projects in Canada’s oldest national park.

“It’s going to take 20 to 30 years (to do proper mitigation) and mother nature’s going to beat Banff before that.”

He made those comments less than a day after a massive wildfire howled into the town of Jasper, charring large swaths of it.

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Jasper, he said “was probably the model community for the urban part of (wildfire prevention) and 5 km outside the town to reduce fuel but the next part of the puzzle was to reduce the next 10-15 km.”

“That’s the way it was for Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and Kelowna.”

Both towns and national parks face a “perfect storm created by our ecosystem, bugs and beetles, fuel, climate change and urbanization.”

Jasper, he said, was beset by pine beetles that killed trees and provided ideal fire fuel, what he termed wildfire “nuclear bombs.”

The Bow Valley, by contrast, has been largely and uniquely spared but it’s only a matter of time before that changes, said White for whom wildfire devastation has become personal.

His family owned a waterfront property in Lahaina, Hawaii that was destroyed by last year’s Maui wildfire.

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White, who was born in Banff and has deep family roots there, said he’s long lobbied for a more comprehensive effort to create what he calls locally-managed “community forests” that would establish concentric bands of fire breaks made through timber-thinning and prescribed burns radiating out 15 km from the centre of Banff townsite.

A community forester should also closely coordinate with local firefighters,  he said.

Some good work along those lines has been done between Banff and Canmore, including from the Silvertip golf course towards Lake Minnewanka, he said.

It proved its worth two decades ago, he said.

“The Fairholme Bench initiative was one of the few instances where almost all the above circles of protection were put into place, and as it turned in 2003 a wildfire occurred here, and was safely held,” said White.

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“Up-valley between Banff and Lake Louise, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

But that approach begins with fire smart measures taken at the homeowner level – efforts at reducing wildfire fuel, landscaping and using burn-resistant housing material that must link seamlessly into wider measures creating fire breaks reaching 15 km out.

Ideally, mountain towns like Banff and Canmore would burn off tall grass and eliminate much more combustible conifer trees within their boundaries in favour of safer poplars and aspens, said White.

“If you have 20 conifers on your block, you can bet most of the houses will go, with millions of needles as embers flying like a snow storm,” said White, a resident of Canmore.

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He points to a multitude of locales in Banff town’s immediate vicinity that pose a fire hazard to it, one of them Sulphur Mountain, whose burning western slope “would send embers all over town.”

“Many others within 10 km of both Banff and Canmore could be identified in the community forest plan and prioritized,” added White.

Prescribed burning measures are nothing new and were practised seasonally by First Nations people for thousands of years in forests they inhabited and depended upon.

“While we can go to hotels if there’s a big fire, they had nowhere else to go, that was their home,” said White.

And while those methods have been replicated since, said White, there’s been a relative reluctance employ them more comprehensively.

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“There’s a cultural element to it,” said White.

Conservationist Harvey Locke said wildfire ash raining down on his Banff home, a choking pall of smoke and the images of the destruction in Jasper were a wake-up call to the menace posed to his hometown of 12 years.

“The sky was an apocalyptic gray – we can’t ignore it, it’s got a real rubber-hits-the road element to it,” said Locke, whose family ties to Banff date back 120 years.

Currently, the wildfire risk is rated as extreme in Banff National Park, where visitation has increased by 31 per cent in the past decade and hit a record 4.28 million last year.

Banff town has a population of about 9,400 but is packed during the summer months with thousands more visitors.

Locke and his wife, he said, are now forming evacuation plans, but he notes the routes to flee the town are gravely limited to the TransCanada Hwy. running east and west until they’re joined by Hwy. 1a about 6 km to the west and 20 km to the east at Canmore.

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And he said the town’s decision to turn two blocks of Banff Ave. into a pedestrian mall adds to the bottleneck danger in a town increasingly congested with tourists.

“It’s a major artery around the entire infrastructure of the park,” said Locke.

“It’s very ill-considered, we’ve put a clog in that artery and the implications for traffic now regardless of emergencies is terrible.”

Banff residents are currently in the midst of a plebiscite on the permanence of the vehicle-free stretch of Banff Ave. Locke predicts the vote will go against the pedestrian concept.

Locke said he doesn’t doubt the need for more comprehensive forest management, adding “prescribed burning is the obvious preferred choice to logging.”

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Even more importantly, said Locke, is the realization that more needs to be done to halt climate change, which scientists have concluded creates hotter, faster-burning wildfires by drying forest fuel and even increasing the amount of lightning ignition.

“We know these things are caused by the destabilization of the climate and yet we’re planning to accelerate oil production in this province,” said Locke.

“What we’re seeing in these fires is an order of magnitude worse…a lot of the ways we’re dealing with them is out of date.”

On its website, Parks Canada said it’s spent the past four decades mitigating the wildfire threat in Banff National Park.

The health and safety of Canadians, visitors and Parks Canada staff is of the utmost importance. Parks Canada has worked continuously over the last 40 years to protect the residents, communities and infrastructure in Banff national park from the effects of wildfire,” it states.

It lists four prescribed fires that have or will be carried out this year as well as a risk reduction project that includes timber removal on the west slopes of Sulphur Mountain that was to be completed in 2023.

But former Parks Canada scientist White said there’s been a persistent dearth of commitment to move towards more robust, concerted wildfire mitigation.

“The first priority is to make sure the town doesn’t burn down but initiatives don’t last – no one has skin in the game,” he said.

BKaufmann@postmedia.com

X (Twitter) @BillKaufmannjrn

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