Fire prevention will be new part of year-round B.C. Wildfire Service

New funding will allow the B.C. Wildfire Service to provide more fire prevention activities around communities, in addition to the usual responding to fires.

The province is providing $145 million to hire more full time staff to make it a year-round operation, not just for the eight-month fire season.

Jobs, Economic Recovery and Innovation Minister Ravi Kahlon told a news conference in Kamloops, one of the benefits of having a full year fire service will be to prepare communities for the expected impacts of climate change.

“[It will] ensure we have the people ready to go, not only to deal with crisis when it emerges, but also to do the important work which is preparing our communities, ensuring we are fire resilient or prepared to mitigate any future fires, but also on the back end, supporting communities when there are incidents that happen,” Kahlon said at the Wildfire Centre in the city.

Kahlon said more than 100 employees will be doing the preventative work across the province, with training the new workers also part of the funding.

The minister said another $98 million over three years will be used to work with communities on programs like fuel mitigation and Fire Smarting.

Cliff Chapman, director of provincial operations for BCWS, said the increase in resources will go far beyond preparedness and responding to fires.

“We’re going to utilize these individuals to assist in risk reduction work that is critical to this province in terms of reducing the impact of wildfires and flooding that we’ve seen in three of the last five seasons,” Chapman said.

He added funding has been announced to partner with the Union of BC Municipalities for fuel mitigation and risk reduction.

“In addition to that, we’re going to increase our capacity in our prevention program to put a focus on Crown land and partner with the forest industry, other partner agencies and stakeholders like the Cattleman’s Association, to make sure we really are looking at risk reduction across the province at scale.”

Chapman said the prevention will start in people’s back yard, then extend to neighbourhoods, the wildland urban interface and onto the forests.

“In the grand scheme of things, our risk reduction program is really tied to our preparedness program because if we can prepare our communities to be more resilient to wildfire, obviously it allows us more capacity to respond when the fires begin,” Chapman remarked

The service already has about 400 full time staff, and normally hires around one-thousand part-time auxiliary and support staff for the spring and summer, many of which are students.

Chapman said the new permanent employees will be hired over the next few months, and protecting communities will be big emphasis of the new full-time work.

“I suspect we’re going to see a lot of uptake on folks that want to come on with us on a permanent basis,” Chapman commented.