What are forestry companies doing to prevent wildfires?
The Mount Underwood fire near Port Alberni burned over 35 square kilometers of forest and closed the primary road to Bamfield, part of it is private land owned by Mosaic Forest Management. Photo courtesy of BC Wildfire Service.
A reader wrote The Discourse recently with a question about why the BC Wildfire Service protects privately-owned forest land on Vancouver Island.
It was an interesting question, but it hinted at a bigger one: What are forestry companies doing to prevent and mitigate wildfires from happening in the first place?
Recent major wildfires on Vancouver Island have been on a mix of Crown land and private land owned by or under license of forestry companies. This includes the fire from early this week on Block 290 near Mount Benson that was recently transferred to Snuneymuxw First Nation.
A recent special investigation by the BC Forest Practices Board on aligning forestry practices with wildfire risk reduction conducted in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, Peace and Sea to Sky areas found that “logging occurs at 11 times the rate of [wildfire risk reduction] treatments” in the wildland-urban interface near communities.
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The report made five recommendations to the province to strengthen regulations for wildfire mitigation and management.
Those recommendations include setting proactive fire management objectives to reduce wildfire hazards, improve legal definitions for the wildland-urban interface, create a central public repository for community wildfire risk plans, require fuel abatements to happen “as soon as practicable” and revise fuel hazard guidelines to align with current best practices.
“The combination of ongoing industrial logging and gear cutting practices combined with escalating climate change impacts creates a real emergency,” said Jens Wieting, senior policy and science advisor for the Sierra Club BC.
## **Who owns the land?**
On Vancouver Island, a large belt of land from Campbell River to Sooke is considered part of the E&N Land Grant and was granted to the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway Company in 1887 to construct a railway. The company sold parcels of that land to forestry companies and now, three forestry companies own about 60 per cent of Vancouver Island Hul’qumi’num territory: TimberWest, Island Timberlands and Western Forest Products.
Indigenous nations assert that there was no consent or consultation for the privatization of this land, and there was also no compensation.
The recent fires on the Island took place on both private and crown lands — but First Nations have been stewarding these lands for millennia before that and continue to do so to this day.
According to Cowhican Tribes member Tl’ul’thut (Robert) Morales, chief negotiator for the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group, the E&N Land Grant gave away more than 809,000 hectares of land on Vancouver Island, which “included around 85 to 90 per cent of the traditional territory of the Hul’qumi’num member nations” in the late 19th century.
Because of the large amount of private forest land on Vancouver Island from what is known as “The Great Land Grab,” expectations of legal access to that land for recreation can be over-estimated by people. That access, in turn, can lead to human-caused wildfires from illegal campfires and heat from vehicles in tinder-dry conditions.
“They just assume, because it’s forested, they should have access to it like they would everywhere else in the province where 95 per cent of the forested area is provincial Crown land,” said Alan Berry, senior wildfire prevention officer for the BCWFS’s Coastal Fire Centre.
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#### ‘An unlawful act’: Tl’ul’thut (Robert) Morales on Vancouver Island’s E&N land grant
## **Who pays for wildfire response on private lands?**
The BC Wildfire Service and forestry companies routinely co-operate on wildfire prevention and suppression on private forest lands, with both sharing equipment, personnel and costs of fighting the fires.
The way that forestry companies pay for wildfire fighting is two-fold. One part is an insurance-style payment made by forestry companies each year based on the size of their land. This helps pay for the costs of the province’s wildfire service when they respond to wildfires on private forest land.
The other way is that forestry companies maintain their own firefighting equipment and crews.
For example, Mosaic Forest Management owns 34 fire trucks, 18 additional water tanks that can be added to trucks as needed and 80 fire trucks owned by contractors across its private lands.
During a wildfire response, those same contractors can be mobilized by the BC Wildfire Service to lend equipment and personnel to fight wildfires.
Jimmie Hodgson, vice president of sustainability and chief forester for Mosaic Forest Management, said when forestry operations are taking place during fire season, every contractor who is working has their own fire truck on site to put out any fires if one starts.
Berry told The Discourse that sometimes, forestry companies and contractors already have heavy equipment that is near the site of a wildfire that can be used faster than bringing it in from other locations.
“If there’s an excavator that we need and it’s half-a-kilometre down the road, but our closest excavator on contract is two or three hours away, well, we will do what makes the most sense,” he said.
The province earmarked $40 million for the BC Wildfire Service Prevention fund in the 2024 budget for wildfire risk reduction on Crown land, cultural and prescribed fire, FireSmart and other wildfire resilience partnerships. Another $30 million was for the FireSmart Community Funding and Supports program, and $60 million was given to the Forest Enhancement Society of BC for wildfire risk reduction or enhanced wood fibre utilization.
Last year, the estimated cost of wildfire suppression was $621 million according to the province. Over one million hectares burned from wildfires in 2024, more than double the 20-year average, but far less than the 2.9 million hectares that burned in 2023. So far this year, an estimated 733,000 hectares have burned according to the BC Wildfire Service dashboard.
A fire near Nanaimo Lakes Road on Sunday was quickly controlled by crews from the BC Wildfire Service and Mosaic Forest Management. **Photo courtesy of BC Wildfire Service.**
## **Clearcutting and commercial thinning**
The Sierra Club’s Jens Wieting told The Discourse that one thing forestry companies need to do is move away from the practice of clearcutting entire blocks of forest.
“Clearcutting is never the answer to climate change impacts,” Wieting said. “There’s this narrative right now that the logging industry can help reduce the risk of fire, but that’s not true in the case of clear cutting.”
Wieting said one of the problems with clearcutting, even years after it has been replanted, is that the new trees that grow there are all of a similar age and canopy height.
“The problem with that is, especially in recent clear cuts which have extreme drought conditions, a lot of wood is left behind and dries out quickly,” he said. “These younger trees cannot moderate the microclimate like big trees. When you walk into an old-growth forest on a hot summer day the temperature is many degrees cooler than in the surrounding areas that were clear cut.”
Hodgson acknowledged “there’s no hiding behind [the fact] that the climate is changing” and that there are more wildfires on the coast, and larger ones, than there were previously.
Hodgson said Mosaic recently started to modify some of its forestry operations near communities — where the risk of wildfires would threaten lives and property of people — with what it calls a commercial thinning program, where only half the trees are removed. The remaining forest still stands, but is thinner.
“So you’re left with that kind of continuous canopy after the fact, much different than your traditional clear cuts,” he said.
Aerial view of a commercial thinning project showing the parallel trails where thinning equipment worked. **Photo courtesy of Mosaic Forest Management.**
The commercial thinning program is “very new to the coast,” according to Hodgson, only starting within the past three years in the Cowichan Valley, the Nanaimo area and as far north as Buckley Bay.
Clearcutting in that urban interface area does still happen, Hodgson said, with the thinning program being an expensive alternative that works best when the product can be used in and around the communities.
“We cannot completely reverse the impacts of climate change, as we are already seeing, but the way we manage forests and reform forestry practices will play a huge role for the health and safety of people in British Columbia,” Wieting said, pointing to a report written by UBC forestry professor Peter Wood that found nine out of 15 climate risks identified in B.C.’s 2019 Strategic Climate Risk Assessment were impacted by logging.
## **Removing wildfire fuel**
Industrial pile burning is often done during the shoulder season by forestry companies to reduce potential fuel for wildfires and is strictly regulated according to the BC Wildfire Service. **Photo courtesy of BC Wildfire Service.**
One thing forestry companies are doing to mitigate wildfire risk is fuel abatement — reducing wildfire hazards (fuel) on lands. For example, companies will remove slash piles of wood that are left after logging is complete in an area.
The province requires forestry companies to hire a licensed forester to complete a risk assessment which takes into account the site’s proximity to communities, the company’s ability to burn excess wood under open burning smoke regulations and other options.
Provincial regulations require assessments of fire hazards to take place every three months if within two kilometres of the legal wildland / urban interface, or every six months if further away. Qualified licence holders have between two to three years to address a fire hazard since the start of industrial activity while non-qualified licence holders have between six months to a year.
The BC Forest Practice Board’s investigation found that most license holders help reduce risk of wildfires through fuel abatement, but 16 per cent of cutblocks sampled did not meet the legal requirements and another 21 per cent needed further work to meet the requirements in the legal timeframe.
The report says regulatory restrictions related to smoke control and costs were the greatest obstacles for forestry companies to meet those requirements and recommended economic incentives to help with wildfire mitigation work.
One thing Mosaic does, in addition to the burning of slash piles in the shoulder season when permitted, is operate a public firewood program to help with removal of excess wood for personal use such as home heating. People can buy a firewood permit on site and funds raised are donated to community organizations.
The firewood program is directly connected to Mosaic’s fuel abatement practices.
“Twenty or 30 years ago, almost everything was burned,” Hodgson said. “The loggers would leave and then they’d have a prescribed burn. We’re trying to balance the approach today and really focus on the utilization side of it.”
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## **Where we’re going, we need roads**
During wildfire season, Mosaic routinely closes its private roads to recreational traffic by closing the gates to discourage people from accessing the forest in ATVs, dirtbikes and other vehicles. The heat and sparks from these motorized vehicles pose wildfire risk, especially under dry and hot conditions.
Some of Mosaic’s workforce still works during the week so the gates can be open but Hodgson said they are not meant to be open for public access until there is reduced fire risk.
In 2024, an estimated 30 per cent of wildfires in the province were caused by human activity, while 70 per cent were from lightning strikes, according to the province.
Wieting said he would like to see logging companies deactivating logging roads to help restore the “ecological integrity where possible in these industrially degraded landscapes to create more open forests.”
However, Berry said while the logging roads that criss-cross much of Vancouver Island’s forests can pose a fire risk by making these forests more accessible to people, those same roads also help facilitate BC Wildfire Service’s access when they need to get to a fire.
“If they weren’t harvesting in there, the wildfire service wouldn’t have easy access, and we commonly use those road systems as [fire] guards or barriers when we’re laying down our suppression plans,” he said.
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## ****Good fire versus bad fire****
Prescribed fires, such as this one near the Williams Lake Stampede Grounds in 2024, can help reduce wildfire risk and is a practice that the service is looking to expand on Vancouver Island. **Photo courtesy BC Wildfire Service**.
Not all fires are bad. In fact, the BC Wildfire Service is looking at starting more fires on eastern Vancouver Island in an effort to expand its cultural and prescribed burning program.
Controlled burning helps reduce the amount of fuel load — what is available to burn — in an area. They are lighter burns that also support new growth and germination on the land, promoting natural regenerative processes and the control of invasive species.
First Nations have practiced cultural controlled burns for millennia but for a long time, the colonial government put forth policies of fire suppression (such as the 1874 Bush Fire Act) that banned these burns. Research shows these policies have led to a build-up of forest fire fuels, increased fire risk, decreased forest resilience and, in turn, more out-of-control wildfires.
Berry said the ecosystems on the east side of Vancouver Island, including Garry Oak ecosystems which are quite dry, would benefit from controlled, prescribed burning. Garry Oak ecosystems in particular rely on low-intensity ground fires to “limit the spread of competing tree species, remove accumulations of dead wood and other vegetation and promote new growth,” according to the province.
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On the south Island, biologist James Miskelly does prescribed burns at Rocky Point, home to a Garry oak ecosystem which has historically relied on controlled burning to keep it healthy.
In B.C.’s southern interior, known for its dry landscape and frequent wildfires, groups such as the Salish Firekeepers Society and Ntityix Resources have taken up Indigenous-led controlled burning.
Berry said due to ongoing fire suppression practices, wildfires that once occurred naturally every 30 to 50 years are no longer happening on the east side of Vancouver Island. But that also means there has been decades of forest growth, creating fuel for fires. This is where controlled or prescribed fires can help.
The BC Wildfire Service is looking at partnering with provincial parks and wants the public to understand that prescribed burns are not only beneficial to suppress wildfires in the peak fire season, but are also good from an ecological perspective.
“We are looking to introduce the good fire — prescribed fire — in areas all along Vancouver Island where it makes sense from an ecological standpoint,” Berry told The Discourse.
_With files from Julie Chadwick and Madeline Dunnett._
