Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Wildfire near Penticton, B.C. balloons to 200 hectares, marches towards luxury development

The Skaha Creek wildfire, burning southwest of Penticton, B.C., crested the ridge and crept down the mountainside on Sunday night, threatening a luxury hillside residential development.
© Courtesy: Glenn Norton The 100 hectare Skaha Creek wildfire is burning directly above the luxury Skaha Hills development west of Penticton, B.C.

The wildfire, first discovered on Aug. 28, was described by locals as looking like a volcano had erupted as bright orange flames illuminated the night sky.

Read more: Cooler temperatures help slow growth of Skaha Creek wildfire near Penticton, B.C.

Plumes of smoke could be seen billowing from large swaths of the mountainside above Penticton Regional Airport (YYF) on Monday morning.

The blaze is now highly visible from the entire City of Penticton, Highway 97 and surrounding communities. It is 212 hectares in size and is believed to be human-caused.

No evacuation alerts or orders have been issued, though some residents living in the Skaha Hills development directly below the wildfire are packing up and preparing to leave if conditions deteriorate.


The Skaha Creek wildfire is being managed as part of the Okanagan complex, lead by an incident management team.

Read more: More military crews join B.C. wildfire fight

Fire information officer Roslyn Johnson said crews will focus their efforts on the east flank of the fire, which is closest to homes, with direct attack operations to contain all spot fires across Skaha Creek Road.

"Heavy equipment will work to build an indirect line on the west and north flanks," Johnson said.


"There are two heavy and two medium helicopters working the fire today. Skimmers and air tankers will continue to support the incident, if necessary."

An aerial assault hammered the vigorous surface fire over the past two days, with five helicopters, nine skimmers and three air tankers supporting ground crews on Sunday.

Read more: Volunteers begin sifting through ashes of Lytton, B.C. fire for family heirlooms

"The skimmers were providing cooling action and air tankers were putting down lines of retardant," Johnson said.

"Heavy equipment worked along the west flank constructing guard and crews worked using direct attack method along the east flank."

The City of Penticton issued a statement on Sunday warning that firefighting response efforts may impact operations at the nearby Penticton airport.


Passengers are advised to check yyf.penticton.ca for current flight information.

Recreational boaters on Skaha and Okanagan Lakes are also asked to stay close to shore to allow aircraft responding to the nearby wildfire to collect lake water.

Cooler conditions are lowering the intensity of the fire, with temperatures forecasted to be in the low 20's for much of the week, a far cry from the high 30 C and low 40 C that fuelled B.C.'s brutal wildfire season earlier this summer.

Read more: Okanagan residents urged to secure garbage due to hungry bears displaced by wildfires

Winds could gust to 40 kilometers per hour on Monday evening, according to Environment Canada.

A special air quality statement has been issued for the Okanagan Valley due to wildfire smoke.

As of Sunday, there are 232 active wildfires burning in B.C. Nearly 4,000 properties across the province remain under an evacuation order, and 6,255 properties are on alert.

Since the start of the 2021 fire season, 1,558 wildfires have scorched 864,665 hectares of earth.

Nearly 3,000 firefighters are on the front lines, assisted by 443 out-of-province firefighters and 110 helicopters and airplanes.



B.C. wildfires a ‘wake-up call’ to return to Indigenous-led fire management

Traditional burns offer a way to protect the land, sustain Indigenous cultural practices and unite two very different worldviews, say fire experts.

“Fire is not bad, fire is a life bringer, and the syilx people have lived in harmony with the land in a reciprocal relationship since time immemorial,” says sxʷuxʷiyaʔ, the Penticton Indian Band’s project manager for the Natural Resource Department.

sxʷuxʷiyaʔ manages traditional burns in and around snpink’tn (Penticton), in the southern Interior of B.C. on unceded syilx territory.

“Fire is a tool our people have used for thousands and thousands of years to manage our timxw [life force], our lands, our animals, our berries,” says sxʷuxʷiyaʔ.

“If you plan, as our people have done — where to burn, when to burn and what to burn — fire actually replenishes the land, replenishes our food source, to keep the land healthy.”

In recent months, wildfires have been moving rapidly through the territory. And Kira Hoffman says she sees these fires as a “wake-up call” to settlers to listen to, learn from and work with Indigenous fire management practices.

She’s a post-doctoral researcher with the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry.

“One of the things I find really frustrating right now is many agencies saying they don’t have the expertise to engage in more controlled fire on the landscape at the scale we need.

“I think that the big issue is that they are not considering the relevant experience and knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, and the lifelong practice of understanding fire, and being taught fire, and how many ways you can use fire,” she says.

“There are so many examples where people are successfully living with fire in fire-dependent landscapes, because they are a fire-dependent culture and without it, it can totally erode a landscape.”

sxʷuxʷiyaʔ says he knows “firsthand what we can do when we come together and work together.”

“Whenever we get referrals for prescripted fuel reduction burns or prescribed burns we inform B.C. Wildfire Services [BCWS] that this is syilx territory and we manage our land with fire and we have a very developed process for burn prescriptions, fuel reductions, and fuel modifications and treatment,” he says.

“We [then] lead the project collaboratively because that’s our resources, that’s our timxw.”

syilx Peoples have long been practicing traditional burning protocols following syilx scientific methodologies.

Burns were systematic and strategic, he explains.

“We didn’t just start a fire and let it burn. It was selectively burned, based on multiple values [such as] … berry production … animal population … disease, grasslands, diseased trees.

“And it was not burned every single year. It was one area that was burned, [then] another area burned, and you wouldn’t return to the same area until after quite some time. It might be after four years, or after 20 years. It was all dependent on the landscape.”

Protocols around traditional burning are deeply embedded in the captikw, the oral storytelling laws that guide the values and ethics of the syilx people.

“We have names for everything when it comes to doing burns,” says sxʷuxʷiyaʔ.

And while the practice is still very active in the snpink’tn area of the syilx territory, colonial governments have made it difficult to carry out, he says.

“The Canadian government has been stifling our efforts to manage our land properly — giving people fines for lighting fires, setting up private properties [and] provincial parks, and stopping us from managing our landscapes with fire.

“I believe, and, because of my training of writing fire prescriptions with a syilx lens on it, that the wildfires we are experiencing today are a product of mismanagement of lands by Canada, and by extension, of course, the province of B.C.,” he says.

As a researcher, Hoffman has been studying pyro-diversity, the role of traditional burns in sustaining the land prior to colonization, and the kind of impacts these burns could have on the land today.

She says her team at UBC has reviewed “a thousand papers” in an effort to better understand “the relationship between biodiversity and controlled burning.”

They’ve found that “it didn’t matter if it was a tundra or a savanna grassland, if you used fire and you used it regularly for cultural purposes, it benefited biodiversity.”

And it’s not just in papers that she’s seen the positive impacts of cultural burns, says Hoffman, who says she worked as a B.C. wildfire fighter for many years prior to becoming a researcher.

“When I’m out on the land, I can see where cultural burnings have happened on the landscape,” she says.

“A south-facing slope, for instance, that has more berries than what should be there. It’s just the highest density of huckleberries, and it’s obvious it’s a cultural burning area … And you can dig down in the soil and see the char, or you can go around and see the fire scars in those meadows.”

This healthy abundance of berry growth is one of the many markers of a healthy thriving ecosystem, she says.

“It’s just really clear that land was managed for so long by people, and people who have unbelievable expertise in fire.”

Hoffman points out that there is a significant difference between what colonial institutions often describe as “prescribed burns” and traditional or cultural burns practiced by Indigenous Peoples.

“The difference between prescribed burning and cultural burning is a very specific community practice. So who does the burning, where the burning is done, and how it’s done is very different,” she says.

What’s interesting is the way these two systems of knowledge are speaking to each other right now, she says.

“The traditional knowledge and [contemporary] fire knowledge … Coming out of Indigenous communities is the same as what the [Western] scientists are saying, too — which is we need more fire on the land. Whether that’s prescribed fire or cultural burning, or best case scenario both.”

“I would really like to see Indigenous-led fire programs,” she adds. “[sqilxw] know how a fire is going to burn. They know when the rains are going to come based on what’s going on. So I’m always totally gobsmacked when I hear there isn’t enough fire knowledge [by governing agencies] to do controlled burning.”

sxʷuxʷiyaʔ agrees.

“We have thousands of years of knowledge and experience with it, and our resources and knowledge are being seriously underutilized and underfunded,” he says.

Tim Lezard is a council member for the Penticton Indian Band, based in Snpink’tn. He says in his community, traditional burning is crucial.

“Like any tradition, it is birthed out of necessity,” he says, adding that syilx Peoples knew that the health of the land meant the health of the people.

Lezard’s grandmother, Annie Kruger (nee George), was a firekeeper in their family, meaning she held the knowledge around when, where and how to start traditional burns.

“She talked a lot about the berry bushes, like the black caps. She would go burn those, and raspberries, and burn those patches,” he says.

“My dad and uncles would go along the creekside to burn, [and] my grandpa would make them clean up around the creeks and burn up any dead plants,” he says.

“My grandma would always stress you must always have an intention when you first start [a] fire, and ask yourself: ‘What is the intention here?’

Lezard says the provincial government could be spending less on fire suppression and more on proactive measures through fuel management — as his family has done for generations.

“A lot of it is based on fear from colonizers. They came here and colonized our people and they saw our resources as money rather than being part of the land. That’s a big part of it is colonizers’ mentality is more around fire suppression.”

The BCWS should be working with and learning from sqilxw Peoples, says Lezard.

“Our intentions are both going in the same direction,” he says. “Whether it’s quantifiable through western science or … Indigenous science, there will be an overlap and an agreement.”

sxʷuxʷiyaʔ says that it’s possible to have different governing bodies working together to ensure cultural burns are happening in a good way while respecting syilx values and honouring shared intentions.

“They provide resources, we take the lead, but we collaborate,” he says.

“We go out at their resourcing with our knowledge keepers, our burn specialists, and then we write our prescription and what we do is merge them, so that a burn plan can move forward with our [sqilxw] values and our interests at the forefront of the decision making.”

Kelsie Kilawna, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Discourse

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