Federal government is in charge of park management, and it let wildfire fuel pile up around Jasper for decades
By Jamie Sarkonic, National Post, July 25, 2024
As of the afternoon of July 25, heart-wrenching images from Jasper show that, at least on some streets, only charred skeletons remain after a wildfire, 400 feet high in some places, ravaged the townsite the previous night. Elsewhere, fortunately, buildings appeared untouched by the flames, but that’s only so helpful.
Losses have been described as “significant”; from her limited point of view, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith estimated the extent of the damage to be a potential 30 to 50 per cent, but the official toll will come from Parks Canada. And though the fire blew in from Alberta’s forest protection zone, Jasper is the responsibility of the federal government. Thus it’s Ottawa that’s in charge of the park’s forest management and, crucially, fire mitigation.
A heavy dread has set in that a very special place has been lost, or at least irreversibly changed, but with that comes another sting: that this was a problem of human making, and that it was one that park authorities should have addressed long ago.
Warnings of a mega-fire have rumbled for years in Jasper. Preventing fires has been the priority for many of the years since the park’s inception in 1907, in the interest of preserving the forest. But the forest naturally burns on cycles ranging from 50 to 200 years — old, dead growth must ignite to clear out dead carbon and make way for young trees and grassy meadows.
In the 1980s, some controlled burning was wound into the park’s arsenal of fire suppression tactics to account for natural cycles. It was still far from enough, according to a 2022 Parks Canada report: “The scale and frequency (of prescribed fires) has not compensated for the loss of fire disturbance from removing Indigenous ignition practices and applying wildfire suppression actions after World War II.”
Compounding the problem is the mountain pine beetle and the good many trees it’s killed (read: fire fuel created) in recent years, a factor of warm climate conditions.
A Parks Canada report from 2018 noted that from 2015 to 2017, controlled burns were applied to 733 hectares of Jasper National Park. In 2018, 350 hectares of trees were removed to expand a fireguard near the townsite. The park, for reference, has roughly one million hectares.
Most of park ‘under-burned’ compared to natural fire cycles
By 2022, Parks Canada reports showed that most of Jasper’s forests remained largely under-burned respective to the natural fire cycles, for a rating of “poor.” The area of the park’s montane forests — warm and dry valley ecosystems — was 86 per cent below the historic norm as far as burned area goes. Higher up on the park’s mountainsides, the burned area was 88 per cent below the norm; the upper subalpine forests were only a little better, at 79 per cent under.
Only Jasper’s old-growth forests, at 33 per cent below target, weren’t rated “poor.”
It was a tinderbox.
According to Parks Canada, the last massive subalpine fire in Jasper took place over the two summers of 1888 and 1889, depleting 40 per cent of the forests in the area. Tree ring studies give us an idea of previous fires: in 2018, ecologists counted 18 fires from 1646 to 1915 — at which point humans took over, employing a strategy of aggressive suppression.
“For a century the fuel has piled up and only in recent times have managers seen the danger and begun to change course by thinning the woods and defusing built up fuel with their own small fires,” wrote one article about the 2018 study. “But if — in a flash — nature reasserts control before this work is far along, it will carve very deeply a new story into the landscape.”
For a century the fuel has piled up and only in recent times have managers seen the danger and begun to change course by thinning the woods and defusing built up fuel with their own small fires.
Tragically, apparent from the scenes Thursday morning, human efforts didn’t catch up in time.
None of this is news, particularly for anyone who’s been watching the deadfall build up. In 2018, Ken Hodges and Emile Begin, a pair of registered foresters, described the park as a “powder keg waiting to blow up.” They recommended logging in key areas and burn plans to “break up the landscape of continuous fuels that would feed a fire.” They wrote in the town newspaper, forwarded their research to the town council, and explained their fears to the CBC. In response, a Parks Canada official said he was “quite comfortable” with the agency’s planning.
One resident, Marie-France Miron, skeptical of Parks Canada’s optimism, sent her thoughts to the Jasper Fitzhugh.
“The sheer volume of dead and dying pine trees represent an incredible amount of fuel ready to ignite under the right conditions and threaten our town. I wonder how we could’ve let this problem grow to its current state,” she wrote, noting that some areas were still “dead red” despite Parks Canada’s interventions.
Additional efforts have been made since — sprinkler systems and more tree removals were announced in 2020 — but whatever was done, it wasn’t enough.
A lot of fingers will be pointed in the coming days. Indeed, they’ve already been pointed. One Liberal MP, Irek Kusmierczyk, lamented that “this is the world that climate-denying Conservatism will leave our children.” Others blamed the Alberta government for cutting the firefighting budget in 2019 — namely, a wildfire rappel team that fought in remote zones. Those teams wouldn’t have been in play in Jasper, given the ease of road access, and the provincial firefighting budget has since been raised.
Other complaints were made that the military was called in too late, and that the military was too slow to respond.
But the availability of a few dozen, or few hundred, more people to spray water onto a raging inferno in hellish conditions could only have done so much. The best time to prevent this fire was during summers past. With any hope, Ottawa will apply the dire lessons learned in Jasper to the rest of its mountain parks.