Jen Gerson: The feds didn't listen. Jasper burned
The federal government insisted that they were taking the issue seriously. That they had a plan. And then a third of the town was destroyed.
By: Jen Gerson
When Ken Hodges heard about the devastating wildfire that took out part of the historic mountain town of Jasper this week, he said he was "frustrated."
"All I could say is that we tried to warn them that it was coming. We told them constantly. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.”
The retired forester, along with his colleague Emile Begin, spent years repeatedly warning the parks service, the federal and provincial government, city council, and residents, that mis-management of the forests around Jasper had created a tinderbox that would inevitably spark a massive wildfire.
"I just feel so badly for the people who have lost their homes and their businesses. Could it have been prevented? I don't know. If they had done everything they could have? Maybe. Something was going to happen over time, so it's so frustrating and devastating."
Hodges first spotted the problem almost a decade ago while skiing near Marmot Basin. From his years working in forestry in B.C. — a province that had previously been devastated by both wildfires and infestations of the Mountain Pine Beetle — Hodges was able to identify similar patterns of decay in the forests in Alberta.
“It was a hillside on the way up to Marmot that I looked up and thought ‘holy crap. The Mountain Pine Beetle is here.’” His experience told him exactly what would follow — fire.
Not just any fire. "It's the intensity and the ferocity of the fire that can cause the problem. With climate change, that exacerbates the situation as well."
Eventually Hodges connected with Begin. The two men between them had 40 years of experience in forestry in B.C. and Alberta, respectively. They feared the Parks service was not prepared for what the men had seen in B.C. — and told them so. Repeatedly. Vociferously. They also sent letters of warning to several ministers; they met with the local municipality. They were interviewed by the CBC for a story that was headlined “Jasper National Park not prepared for potential forest fire 'catastrophe,' researchers say.”
That was in 2018.
Also in 2018, the pair issued an open letter that read: “The potential for a huge fire or mega fire is real. Fires of this type and magnitude generally occur in mid August to early September. With climate change it may occur earlier.”
The response?
“They just wrote us off,” Hodges told The Line this week.
What their experience as foresters had taught them is that the Lodgepole pine, Mountain Pine Beetle, and wildfire all exist in a symbiotic relationship. Pines are a pioneer species — a weed of trees, so to speak. When left undisturbed, they can rapidly take over and dominate a landscape, crowding out other species of trees and the grassland necessary for healthy forest ecosystems.
The pine beetle preys on diseased, stressed, or old pine forests, serving as a natural predator. The beetle moves in and decimates hectares of forest, leaving millions of highly flammable trees dying in place.
In the three to 10 years after the beetles have finished their work, the regenerating forest is a mix of early, fine growth, and the remaining and decaying pine logs. That is when the risk of a forest fire is at its peak. The new growth serves as kindling and the dead logs as fuel, the perfect mix for a massive and catastrophic wildfire. To make matters worse, the bark that sloughs off the pine trees can then catch flame and get sucked up the fire column to be distributed kilometres away, ensuring a fire's rapid spread.
To close the circle, those wildfires also help to keep the beetles in check. Which is why a Parks Canada report on the mountain pine beetle was so significant.
In 2016, the parks service released a Mountain Pine Beetle Management Plan that conceded the problem. For 70 years, Parks Canada failed to understand the importance of wildfires in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Instead, it had adopted a policy of “fire suppression” — which created conditions for the unchecked spread of dense forests consisting of lodgepole pines, among other tree species.
In other words, while we tend to associate the vistas of Jasper and Banff with thick blankets of mature, coniferous forests, this is actually the result of entirely unnatural human intervention — what we call forest management. If left to nature, these forests would burn on generational intervals, allowing regular renewal of the landscape.
Prior to colonization, these regions were nothing like what we see today — thick forests nearing the end of their natural life cycle — but rather forests that were mixed with wide open grasslands. Indigenous people who existed on this landscape understood the natural cycle very well, and were known to conduct controlled burns in order to create habitat for wildlife.
According to a study published in 2007 examining Parks Canada's fire management program: "Due to the absence of fire for much of the past century, formerly open, savannah-like Douglas-fir forest and lodgepole pine forest in the study area [around Jasper] have changed significantly. They are now characterized by a scattering of dominant widely spaced, large diameter Douglas-fir veterans that are ingrown with a dense multilayered canopy of shorter, smaller-diameter lodgepole pine and Douglas-fir."
The end result of Parks Canada misguided fire policies was that the entire parks ecosystem had become a tasty snack for legions of pine beetles. Or as Parks Canada itself put it in its 2016 pine beetle report: "Historically, fires would have burned through Jasper National Park's valley bottoms as often as every fifteen years, creating a landscape with fewer trees. Today, after more than 70 years of fire suppression, most forests in Jasper National Park now contain large, dense, continuous stands of old lodgepole pine that are available to mountain pine beetles."
And what those bugs left in recent decades was a landscape packed with highly flammable, unnaturally dense, dead pine trees.
In about 2000, Parks Canada realized the error, and began to change its strategy. It adopted a FireSmart policy that was intended to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire in the mountain towns that had sprung up in the direct path of generational fire flows. It also began to schedule controlled burns.
But according to several foresters, including Emile and Begin, this was wildly inadequate to the task. The only way to reduce the risk of a mega fire was to truly manage the forest through either selective tree removal, or straightforward clear cut logging. It would also involve aggressive measures to clear out potential fuel — ie; trees — around mountain towns. Of course, nobody moves to a place like Jasper or Banff in order to live in a barren fire break. People want to live, with all the comforts and safety afforded by civilization, in pristine wilderness without acknowledging the paradox of that desire.
And widescale logging in a Park that is legislatively committed to maintaining “ecological integrity” is a hard sell. These are management concepts that run directly counter to what parks are supposed to stand for in our collective imagination — a kind of idyllic natural environment untouched by the pollution of man.
Hodges and Begin were not alone in their concerns, but they were among the loudest and most public critics of the government in response to the growing risk near Jasper.
Although wildfires are a natural part of the ecological cycle, under-managed forests when combined with climate change — which was creating drier, hotter, windier forests — could only exacerbate the fire when it did come. The foresters warned of not just an ordinary wildfire, but a mega-fire — a fire so dangerous and so hot that it would not only put human life at risk, but also sterilize the soil and permanently damage the ecosystem.
Hodges warned then-minister of Environment and Climate Change Catherine McKenna about this risk directly; yet, ironically, the government's most vocal minister on the seriousness of climate change seemed to be the unwilling to take aggressive action to mitigate the risk of same.
"In 2018, we wrote letters to the minister. We wrote one to Parks Canada Jasper, and we wrote one to the council in Jasper. We also had meetings with both of those groups and we got nowhere," Hodges said. "They said 'we're doing what we can,' but I don't think they really understood the implications of what they were facing. They hadn't had the experience that we had had."
In her letter of response to the foresters, McKenna said Parks Canada was making changes to address fears of fuel build up around Jasper. From her letter: "Parks Canada is taking this matter seriously and has implemented the Jasper National Park Mountain Pine Beetle Management Plan over the past two seasons to address this issue," the response read. "The Plan has three components: 1) application of prescribed fire to achieve conservation goals; 2) removal of trees where prescribed fire is not feasible; and 3) work with the Municipality of Jasper to facilitate community protection."
Hodges and Begin regarded McKenna's response as both condescending and the measures laid out therein inadequate. They said they followed up with McKenna's staff, arguing that they did not, in fact, have matters under control.
The response was mirrored by Parks staff, as well.
Alan Fehr, a superintendent for Jasper National Park, told the CBC in 2018 that Parks Canada had received the forester's work. In response, he said he was confident in the work the service had done. "Jasper is located in a forested environment and wildfires are always a concern to us," Fehr told the CBC at the time. "We're quite comfortable with where we are with our own emergency planning and evacuation planning."
As the Jasper townsite can now attest, Hodges and Begin were right. Unless we consider the loss of roughly a third of the town a success, Parks Canada was wrong.
The debate about how to manage the forest was not a matter of private fights and memos. Neither were Hodges and Begin the only people to bring up their concerns.
Jim Eglinski, a former MP for the Yellowhead riding (which contains Jasper) took up the cause at least five times times in the House of Commons, repeatedly using his allotted time to query ministers about whether they were doing enough to reduce forest fuel loads that had accumulated thanks to the pine beetle infestation. Each time, he received similar responses from government MPs. To wit: "We are working very hard to ensure that we are not only expanding the parks, but ensuring the ecological integrity of the parks that currently exist," then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson said in 2016. "Our government is absolutely committed to the ecological integrity of our national parks. That is my first priority as a minister," then minister of Environment and Climate Change McKenna said in 2017. "Certainly invasive species in our forest sector are something we have dealt with over the decades and centuries in this country. We are working hard with our partners in the forest sector to find solutions to some of these challenges," then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Natural Resources Kim Rudd said in 2017.
When I spoke on background with staff with the Alberta forest ministry, they confirmed that Hodges and Begin's understanding of the science was correct. The fuel load accumulated due to the pine beetle infestation is probably at least partially to blame for the extraordinary ferocity of the flames that ripped through Jasper this week.
Not, to be clear, the only factor. Alberta forestry minister Todd Loewen has acknowledged that forest fires are complicated — and this one especially so. “There's a lot of factors that went into this fire. It's believed that it was started by lightening — that's something out of our control right there. It had, of course, been very hot and dry and that adds to the quickness of spread and how the fire develops. And, of course, there were incredibly high winds. Normally the winds come out of the west in that area, but these winds were coming from the south," the minister told The Line.
"But there's no doubt that the lay of the land as far as the age of the forest and the pine beetles had an effect. As far as killing trees, those factors definitely played into how the fire moved also."
Anecdotal reports at the time of the fire noted that the wave of flame was as high as 400 feet in some places, and moving at a speed of 15 meters per minute. Whatever criticism Alberta warrants for cutting funding to firefighting in the past, both Parks Canada and Harjit Sajjan, minister for Emergency Preparedness have come out insisting that the park did not lack resources to fight this fire. The general consensus appears to be that there were adequate resources to fight the fire once it started — a fire this large and this fast is simply not possible to control once it begins. One might as well try to direct the finger of God.
The fact that Jasper was preserved as well as it was — most of the critical infrastructure was saved — is believed to be due to the handful of firefighters who stayed behind to soak key segments of town.
Finding accountability for Jasper will be further complicated by the fact that the town sits in a nest of jurisdictional overlap. While it is technically an Alberta municipality, its placement within a national park means that it falls under the aegis of the federal government via Parks Canada. Meanwhile, Alberta Minister Loewen confirmed that Alberta could not send in firefighting resources unless the federal government asked it to do so — and everything that was so requested was sent.
I reached out to Parks Canada for twice for comment for this story, but after several days, nobody from the agency has responded.
In this case, then, the only question Jasper has to consider is whether more ought to be done to prevent a fire of this intensity and size from occurring; whether the Parks service will move more aggressively to prevent fires near townsites like Banff in the future with more burns and, perhaps, more aggressive logging.
Lastly, as the residents of Jasper rebuild, they are going to have to make peace with the fact that their natural setting is, in fact, quite unnatural. And may not be sustainable.
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I can imagine the uproar if the federal government had approved large scale logging in Jasper National Park. A similar initiative to clear out dead and dying hemlock in Vancouver’s Stanley Park has been met with protests and a lawsuit from environmental activists. They insist it’s better to leave the trees to decay in place rather than “artificially disturb” the natural setting. They don’t seem to perceive the consequences of a forest fire occurring in Stanley Park, itself at the heart of some of Canada’s most densely populated and expensive urban environment. At best, a fire in Stanley Park could seriously damage a public treasure. At worst, it could be a catastrophe impacting a hundred thousand people. With the homeless encampments found throughout the park, a fire is also terribly foreseeable. Hopefully the disaster in Jasper gets people to wake up, or at least persuades judges hearing the lawsuit of the merits of the logging.
Absolutely fantastic article! Thank you. I am so frustrated with friends focused only on one, simplistic explanation (typically “climate change”). And those that think bringing in other factors is somehow denying climate change. This article recognizes climate change as one, of many, complex contributing factors for this fire.
Thank you!