It’s widely accepted that the conditions for the wildfire complex that has destroyed at least a third of structures in the Jasper townsite have been coming together for decades.
The nearly homogenous pine forest throughout most of Jasper National Park never stood a chance against the mountain pine beetle, which arrived there in 1999.
Parks has been monitoring and managing the mountain pine beetle since.
In 2015, the Crown agency formed a working group with Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN), the Northern Forestry Centre and the Government of Alberta (Alberta Agriculture and Forestry) to oversee the response to the destructive bug.
Coincidentally or not, that was the same year the Excelsior fire forced the evacuation of the Maligne Valley.
Spotted by a plane shortly after 3 p.m. July 9, by the time a response could be mobilized, Excelsior was already too intense to fight from the ground.
“This thing just exploded on us,” Dave Smith, a fire and vegetation specialist with Parks Canada, explained during a workshop the following November.
Within 45 minutes the fire, which started at the north end of Medicine Lake, went from a small plume of smoke rising over Signal Mountain to a running crown fire moving south towards Maligne Lake, according to a story published by the Jasper Fitzhugh.
“As it began to pick up speed, the fire managed to jump over Maligne Lake Road at the north end of Medicine Lake and burned the slopes along its west side, effectively cutting off the only road in and out of the valley.”
That triggered the evacuation of about 1,000 people from the Maligne Valley and much hand-wringing over what would have happened if the fire had changed direction and started moving toward the townsite.
With the help of seven aircraft and 80 fire line personnel (and some cooler and wetter weather) Parks brought the fire under control in about two weeks (Maligne Lake Road was reopened July 22).
Excelsior consumed 966 hectares of forest. Extreme heat in excess of 30C with low humidity and a dry fuel stock combined to allow that fire to move more than six kilometres in its first six hours, all values that are characteristic of the Jasper wildfire complex burning in and around the town today.
Prepare, prevent, prescribe
Parks’ approach to wildfire risk management is based on the core elements of fire management planning: risk reduction, preparedness, prevention, response and prescribed fire.
“The safety of the public and staff, neighbouring communities and park infrastructure is always the Agency’s top priority,” a Jasper National Parks spokesperson told the Jasper Fitzhugh in 2018.
That year, a pair of professional foresters travelled to Jasper from Prince George to present to Mayor Richard Ireland and the rest of town council.
Ken Hodges and Emile Begin, both professional foresters, made the drive from Prince George to warn of the potential for a “mega-fire” in Jasper April 8.
By this time, mountainsides were turning from green to red, the now-dead but still-standing victims of the mountain pine beetle that blanketed them finally dry enough to lose their colour in as clear an alarm as Mother Nature could muster.
They argued the Waterton Lakes National Park fire a year earlier was proof Parks Canada is “unlikely able to address any mega fire situation arising that would ensure public safety. Evidence confirms National Parks have not done their homework.”
The town’s firesmarting effort, led by then-fire chief Greg Van Tighem, focused on teaching residents how to keep their own property as resilient to fire as possible (clearing dead brush, not having plants near to or touching buildings, etc) while embarking on larger-scale projects like creating or expanding firebreaks to protect the community as a whole.
He said in 2018 that study of the Fort McMurray fire revealed that flying embers had started spot fires after catching in the sort of areas that FireSmarting aims to clean up well ahead of the fire itself. And the large firebreak near Waterton had “saved the town” when a fire ripped through Waterton Lakes National Park in 2017.
Indeed, between 2003 and 2018, more than 1,000 hectares of forest surrounding the town underwent intensive forest fuel reduction through the FireSmart program.
But that wasn’t the only lobbying Van Tighem was doing. That year, he convinced Jasper’s town council to shell out about $150,000 for a second trailer filled with specialized fire prevention equipment such as sprinklers, pumps, hoses and other tools designed to soak buildings before embers or the fire reach them.
“It was identified we’re far short of the number of sprinklers, pumps and hoses needed to do the job right,” Van Tighem said at the time.
Weeks later, he was back asking for another $175,000 to create a back-up to the town’s reservoirs. The plan was to install a manifold on an old water main near Old Fort Point that would have pumped water from the Miette River up the hill and tie into the town’s water system in order to feed hydrants once the reservoirs ran dry.
An alternate plan to run a line from the reservoir down to Cabin Creek was discarded after a test showed the water pressure at the bottom of the line would be too great for the system to handle.
Council accepted the Old Fort Point plan, but Mayor Richard Ireland was less than impressed that Van Tighem was before them asking for so much money so shortly after getting his fire trailer.
“I find this distressing,” he said to Van Tighem after his presentation during a regular council meeting. “I’d rather see these come forward as options and maybe we choose both, but this leaves me uncomfortable.”
Reminded of the exchange last week, Ireland pointed out that they had agreed with the fire chief, ultimately.
“Council accepted the advice of then-chief Van Tighem,” Ireland said from Crossfield July 23. “I don’t know the details of whether that system was deployed or not. The last I heard on the ground, there wasn’t an issue with water pressure.”
Within weeks of winning support for that plan, Van Tighem was holding a microphone at a standing-room only open house on the fire situation held at the fire hall.
More than 200 residents wanted to know what Parks Canada was doing to reduce the risk wildfire poses to the townsite.
“I don’t feel safe,” resident Marie-France Miron said after the May 7 meeting, dissatisfied with the measures Parks Canada said it was taking to mitigate the fire risk. Miron went on to land a meeting with the Jasper National Parks superintendent that summer after threatening to organize a protest. “It’s the closest I’ve been” to a wildfire reaching Jasper since moving here in 2005, she said at the time. “There’s way more that should have been done.
“I hope I’m wrong.”
