British Columbia Is Burning
We have a prime minister who has childhood asthma any asthmatic knows what you put into the air you put into yourself and yet this Prime Minister says to do something about climate changes crazy economics literally crazy economics summer wildfires in the US and Canada have burned millions of hectares and forced evacuations up and down the continent here in BC were known for a wet climate but at one point around half the province was covered in smoke and we lost more homes and in any year since 2003 now this is happening with the world facing its hottest year ever an NBC that meant a strangely mild winter and a very hot summer with record droughts and heat so it seems like climate change could be playing a role here we’re in BC travelling from here on the Vancouver coast to the interior to find out active fire zones are typically hard for the public to access we were only allowed into this one because it was partially contained are there fire crews like right in that smoky area that we’re seeing crews are in there with hoses and water right now starting to put out the fire and that will make us able to call that area contained once the fire is brought right down and has been put out we’re hoping to get into the fire zone today and just in case we do we have to put on our fire retardant no mech suits they’re bright orange very bold and they’re supposedly very once so they advised us to kind of wear minimal clothing underneath so we’re driving off-road right now to close as we can get up the mountain to the fire zone and then we’re going to walk on foot from there explain why we’re seeing smoke and not flames it has to do with a lot of different things the fuel type so the different kinds of trees and brush and ground fuels in the area and also the temperature and relative humidity if these smokes did get a bit of direct Sun on them that could easily turn into flame really quickly and this is a good example looking around here with a bunch of dead wood on the ground that is a fuel type that can carry fire really well and that carries quite an intense fire if the fire were to spread this would generate enough energy to get it up into the canopies are there a lot of areas where the burn is so deep that after the winter comes they’ll just bring up again that has happened in areas with especially deep Duff layers so where there’s combustible material that is more than five or ten centimetres deep then it can certainly carry over the winter and come back in the spring how deep you have to dig as you can see here else was in that deep just feeling the edges still hot oh yeah that’s really one really have to use your hand tools open them up is it easy to work with all the radio chatter going on no you get used to hearing your own callsign it’s a crucial part of our whole operation here quesa something picks up what was the worst here it’s that deep 2003-2009 been kind of one of those years this year the BC fire service calls 2003 one of the most catastrophic fire seasons in the provinces recorded history severe droughts led to never-before-seen conditions that have become more common since then yep this has been one of the worst years you see up there outside resources you know so many provinces when did you start fighting fires in summer it’s a late March early April we’ve got rolling pretty early and so you’ve been to a bunch of different fires awesome yeah this is our sixth deployment and what’s it been like that’s been pretty non-stop all over the province up north and and down to Pemberton and cut all over the map how many years have you done this for this is my fourth season okay and how does this compare to previous so if it wouldn’t be the hottest and busiest one I’ve ever experienced is this a full-time job for you guys no no season okay so what do you do in the off season I just graduated from forestry at UBC the regular season for most people is about four months a lot of people are university students like we were and now that we’re not in school we’re here around eight months out of the year but this year it’s been really busy so we’re probably gonna be gonna be putting in work until the logs on the fall so we’re getting into the helicopter to go survey the fire here and Oliver there’s a lot of activity right now so we’re gonna try stand in the way of the fire crews that are battling this but we’re gonna go out there and see what’s going on crews still don’t know what caused this fire but it spread quickly and breached several guard lines while we were there a new fire so late in the summer is unusual but crews have been seeing new fires start later and later every year British Columbia has an annual fire budget of 63 million dollars and so far this year they’ve already spent more than three times that around 200 million the fires have burned over three hundred and three thousand hectares that’s an area more than 26 times the size of Vancouver so Laurie where are we right now so we are standing on the boundary of the Boulder Creek fire which burned this summer ignited through lightning so here we’re standing in an area that burned at what we call high intensity so very hot temperatures when the fire was burning this is a fire that burned in the crown’s it burned all of the surface material and it burned down into the soil and burned up the organics down below the soil surface as well many of the fires in our dry interior forests burned at low intensity fairly frequently once every 10 to 40 or 50 years and those are the fires with lower intensity that burned along the surface damage the trunks of the trees with the thick bark that those thick bark trees actually survived and so what you end up with is the lower severity fires acting like a cleansing agent those are also though the fires that we have very very effectively in the past 60 years of active fire suppression gone in and identified them and put them out as soon as they started and we did that with good intentions to protect the forest but what we’ve ended up doing is allowing fuels to build up now when you do get hot dry conditions and a lightning strike now you have much more fuel and it’s kind of the difference between a campfire in a bonfire if we’re going to adapt to climate change and adapt and accept that fire is an important part of our ecosystems we have to let more fires burn and we have to actually cut some trees to eliminate some of the fuels to control the fire behavior this is a nice example also where the fire burns into that subsurface so you can see here where the fires burned down below the roots into the ground and it’s left this white ash so that’s kind of a waxy coating when the fire burns really hot like this it creates what we call a hydrophobic soil so a water shedding soil and so instead of the water when it starts to rain again infiltrating into the soil and sinking down into the soil as it would normally do it begins to have to pool and then run off along the surface if we look at the hill slopes around us you get a tremendous amount of runoff and it brings with it fine sediments and puts us at risk in these mountainous burned areas of debris flows and and flooding as a result after seeing the huge amounts of damage the fires have caused at just one fire zone it’s clear more than just the forest will be affected I want to find out what that means for the ecosystem when we talk about habitat degradation this is one of the key components this clean clear substrate and water quality it’s really critical to salmon so when we have events like forest fire or landslides and you get all that runoff you get impacts like suffocation of eggs can the salmon adapt to that ah no uh you know let’s say long-term perhaps yes salmon could adapt but in the short term if we’re looking at really rapid changes in temperature they can’t change their behavior quickly enough to keep up with temperature changes in the watershed when you lose those cooler permanent summer streams you lose that run we’re on the territory of the low watt First Nation there the indigenous people of this area and we want to find out how the wildfires have affected them so we’re gonna talk to Jordan who’s the Forester for low watt so this is an early fire this year that the fire was started in April everything was early probably about three weeks earlier than usual this fire here went from from being a little spot burnt that wouldn’t pick it up because there’s so much more heat this year within two hours and got to be about one hectare in size the smoke was really bad yeah we could not even see probably a hundred 100 feet First Nations use small fires both to generate a food source and to prevent large destructive fires areas that have recently burned grows small plants like berries and mushrooms almost right away in the ash how long has the government been stopping a little while from doing its controlled burns I think it comes from pretty well around the 1930s to 40 so I mean we get the 75 year old they’ve only seen it when they’re when they’ve been a kid I mean when you look at it it could benefit the whole community even a lot of the non-natives are out there picking herbs and berries and mushrooms and everything that grow after you burned burned through an area I mean look at all all the green that came up after this and this happened in April and for the future are people worried that this could become the norm this is the second time that they’ve seen it get this dry and it’s getting drier you couldn’t even a lie to put a lighter or match to any of these brushing it putting it we don’t burn it seems that with all these fires there must be a connection to climate change but we’re gonna talk to Simon Donner who’s a climatologist at UBC to find out if that’s actually true is climate change causing the wildfires or climate change is definitely playing a role in the wild fires we had fires before there was climate change and we’ll have fires after this climate change but with the planet warming and with particularly you know drier winters and some drier summers and warmer weather we’re gonna see more frequent and you know larger wildfires what about the data tells you that well it’s about the increases in temperature in the West particularly in Canada where the you know the can is warming faster than the rest of the plan on average last week there was a real reminder to people in BC that climate change is affecting us as well we had exactly what we’re expecting to see in the future we had a really warm winter you know the stuff that fell out of the sky mostly fell as rain particularly you know at the lower elevations so you had scary is it didn’t even open and that then set up the summer for what we experienced you know we had a very warm summer but because this note the snowpack was so poor in the winter it set things up for forest fires it set things up for problems in agriculture when it set things up to the Rotter the water restrictions we ended up with here here in Vancouver and what about the human role in climate change itself and so this is where things get complicated when you try to say are humans driving an increase in wild fires so first you have to say well other wildfire is being driven by changes in climate and there’s evidence for that yes and are is climate change being driven by humans yes so you go by debt by the change in events you can definitely you can definitely see a link it’s hard you know to go from your neighbor driving you know his or her Hummer to work in concluding that because they did that you’re getting a fire you know in the Okanagan Valley but it’s it’s still a link to chain like it’s there and how do you rate Canada’s effort at the federal level in addressing this Kayla has really been a laggard sort of on the international stage on addressing climate change in a way it’s too bad because it would only take a little bit of effort by the federal government to coordinate things going on across the provinces and really like have a national impact we were supposed to talk to Steve Thompson the BC Minister of forests about the funding for fighting fires no response to them and the provinces plans now that these fires are getting bigger but he canceled on us at the last minute when you saw Vancouver covered in smoke by these wildfires this summer what did you think you know this is a terrible thing about being an environmentalist is while it was horrifying at the same time I’m going god I hope it lasts because you keep asking what is gonna be the trigger to make people realize that there are some things more important than just the economy or jobs I thought Katrina was going to do it in the United States and I found after Hurricane Katrina people were asking me do you think this is global warming like there was discussion about that that hurricane sandy came and I thought again wow you know that New York City that’s a big deal and you look at Beijing or you look at India and you see the pollution in the air and you go maybe this will be the thing but for me I hope it was a wake-up call it was horrifying it’s it’s ironic that once again BC is at the front line of climate change I mean British Columbia five years ago the northern forests of this cut of this province turned bright red why because the winters aren’t cold enough to control a parasite that has always been in the forests but as long as you had winters in which you had five six days of 40-below Nature controlled that parasite but now that our winners simply aren’t cold enough mountain pine beetle just exploded in our forests turned red you know look at the contrast between mr.
Obama who went to Alaska which is oiled country to tell the Alaskans look we just can’t keep exploring and burning it we’ve got to get off this and yet the Prime Minister of Canada spent five days in the Arctic recently and never once mentioned climate change how do you think though he’s been able to survive politically in Canada is that in line with the views of scanning II I believe is as tried and with a great deal of success to suppress any discussions that will impinge on the development of Alberta’s tar sands so you shut down you shut down those polar expeditions that are looking studying the effect of climate change he’s fired hundreds of government scientists he’s basically saying everything scientists do for government has to be vetted through government we’ve got a pretty shitty hick history of managing anything on this earth the idea that we’re gonna take over the planet and manage it is lunacy but I operate on the sense of hope the hope that if we pull back nature will surprise us it’s based on the fact that we don’t know enough to even say it’s too late you want to ask me what’s our best path pull back put fences around people start limiting what we do to the air the water and the soil where the problem where the crisis we’ve got to pull back
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