Interior ranchers fume at B.C. Wildfire Service response to blaze

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Ranchers around Spences Bridge on Highway 97 are fuming at B.C. Wildfire Service’s initial decision to stage a “modified response” to the Shetland Creek wildfire, which they contend might have let the blaze race through rangeland that took generations to build up.

The fire started July 12 when two lightning strikes touched off tinder-dry fuels in steep terrain northwest of Spences Bridge, which merged into one big blaze by July 18 and has destroyed at least six homes and damaged up to 20 structures in the Venables Valley.

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B.C. Wildfire Service has since upgraded its response to include 42 structure-protection firefighters, aircraft and heavy equipment to control the fire.

The initial decision to mount the modified response, which classified the fire as posing “no immediate threat to values,” rankled some ranchers whose livelihoods are tied up in the public rangeland at risk in a region plagued by major fires in four of the last seven years.

“They would have put it out if it had happened next to somebody’s house, right,” said Rhonda MacDonald, a rancher who watched the smoke plume from her operation to the east of Shetland Creek, across Highway 1. “But because it’s out in the middle of nowhere, they didn’t.”

After two years of drought in the region, MacDonald said “we all knew it was going to grow and turn into a monster,” and questions why the service wasn’t prepared to do more.

From B.C. Wildfire Service’s perspective, however, modified response involves the dispatch of crews to what was discovered to be challenging conditions, according to fire information officer Nicole Bonnett.

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“Modified,” she added, means a fire is managed using a combination of techniques, including “both direct and indirect tactics.”

Bonnet said in the case of Shetland Creek, tactics included aircraft and ground crews, but “extreme fire behaviour” at times forced crews to pull back.

The fire at Shetland Creek was detected and surveyed by air July 12, but with no ground access, the initial attack crew that responded July 13 spent their first day cutting a trail into the fire to establish a helipad.

Crews spotted the second lightning fire at Teit Creek on July 13 at a high elevation that is inaccessible by ground crews and too dangerous for an initial attack crew to rappel into by helicopter. Helicopters, however, continued to bucket water onto the blaze.

T. J. Walkem, owner of the 60 Ranch near Spences Bridge, was one of those “racing against the flames,” to rescue cattle, but wouldn’t offer an opinion on the response, since he is also a rancher liaison with the service for this fire.

“I don’t think people were anticipating the weather that we had and the dryness of the forest,” Walkem said.

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He added that the anxiety of ranchers, First Nations and other backcountry users is understandable with a fire that is consuming so much of the landscape.

B.C. Wildfire Service has improved its communication with area residents over the year, but Steve Rice, a fruit grower and former regional district representative for the region around Spences Bridge, still sees gaps in the response.

“What I don’t understand is, they can identify hot spots, they can identify the high-risk areas, but they don’t seem to be there on the ready when (fires) happen,” Rice said.

Residents used to talk about what swimming spots they were going to or trips they were going to take during the summer, but are now consumed by conversations about the heat, when the wildfires are going to start and how bad they’ll be, said Rice.

“That’s the frustration a lot of folks have,” Rice said. “It’s been a decade of this every year, with some real peaks and valleys, but there’s always been fires and floods.”

“Why don’t we just sort of wrap our heads around that it’s going to happen and then get some mitigation up front?” Rice said.

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Kevin Boone, general manager of the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association, said authorities have begun giving things such as the value of cattle, higher priority in their decision making and have done a better job of including ranchers and loggers in wildfire response instead of viewing them as hindrances.

Jeff Walsh, an incident commander with the the wildfire service, says crews were using heavy equipment on the mountain slopes above Spences Bridge to prevent fire from burning downslope toward the southern Interior community.

Walsh said in a video update that hot and dry conditions coupled with gusty winds have fuelled erratic and aggressive fire behaviour at the Shetland Creek blaze, driving its spread to the north.

Provincewide, the service is dealing with 430 active fires, 80 per cent of which were sparked by the thousands of lightning strikes that have swept over B.C. in the last few days.

The B.C. Ministry of Emergency Management’s latest update says about 470 properties have been ordered evacuated, while another 3,100 properties are on evacuation alert.

depenner@postmedia.com

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With files from The Canadian Press

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