Logging in Canada’s Most Famous National Park to Save It From Wildfires

By Norimitsu Onishi new york times

BANFF, Alberta – The loggers’ work was unmistakable.

Flanked by dense forests, the mile-long, 81-acre expanse of land on the mountainside had been stripped nearly clean. Only scattered trees still stood, while some skinny felled trunks had been left behind. A path carved out by logging trucks was visible under a light blanket of snow.

The harvesting of trees would be routine in a commercial forest – but this was in Banff, Canada’s most famous national park. Clear-cutting was once unimaginable in this green jewel in the Canadian Rockies, where the long-standing policy was to strictly suppress every fire and preserve every tree.

But facing a growing threat of wildfires, national park caretakers are increasingly turning to loggers to create fireguards: buffers to stop forest fires from advancing into the rest of the park and nearby towns.

“If you were to get a highly intense, rapidly spreading wildfire, this gives fire managers options,” David Tavernini, a fire and vegetation expert at Parks Canada, the federal agency that manages national parks, said as he treaded on the cleared forest’s soft floor.

Still reeling from its worst wildfire season on record last year, Canada is now confronting the quick start of a new one. So-called zombie fires, which smoldered under snow-covered ground during the winter, have sprung to life and forced thousands to flee from affected cities and towns in western Canada.

Coming out of Canada’s warmest winter in history, communities near forests are bracing for another tough wildfire season, and for a future increasingly prone to wildfires as a result of climate change.

Long-planned measures meant to protect against wildfires – like the fireguard in Alberta’s Banff park and other projects in the town of Banff – have taken on a greater sense of urgency.

Last year, a dozen fires were ignited, mostly from lightning, in Banff and two adjoining national parks, including three near the new fireguard. They were quickly extinguished.

But across Alberta, the impact of last year’s record wildfire season was “massive,” said Katherine Severson, director of emergency services in the town of Banff.

The increased number of fires in sparsely populated areas of Canada has affected not only nearby communities, but also distant ones, with the intense smoke they have generated floating into southern Canada and into the United States.

“It’s now normal – every single day, cities and towns are making decisions on whether they can hold outdoor activities because of smoke,” Severson said.

Last year, wildfires scorched 46 million acres of land in Canada, more than doubling the previous record set two decades ago, and sending smoke as far away as Europe. Fires spread uncontrollably across the country, not only in western provinces accustomed to blazes, but also in Quebec and the Maritimes, where such large fires are rare.

This spring, much of Alberta is facing drought conditions. In the Rockies, the snowpack was “exceptionally low,” said John Pomeroy, a hydrologist based near Banff and the director of the Global Water Futures Program.

“As a setup for this time of the year, it looks worse than last year,” Pomeroy said. “But I qualify that by saying that lots could change. Last year, we also had record heat and lack of rainfall.”

Extreme heat and unusual weather patterns helped create the conditions that led to last year’s record wildfire season, said Michael Flannigan, an expert on fire management at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.

“Last year was a real outlier,” Flannigan said. “So statistically, it’s unlikely that you’ll get another outlier.”

Still, wildfire firefighting agencies across the country – which traditionally hired personnel only during fire seasons and included university students on summer jobs – are starting to employ professionals year round as fire seasons grow longer, Flannigan said.

In British Columbia, Flannigan said some “overwintering zombie fires” were so big that firefighting crews could not extinguish them along their perimeters, and they are now actively burning.

“The fire season ended so late last year that they didn’t have time to do as much mop up as they would have liked,” he said.