New Wildfire Plan Coming

The City is forging ahead with plans to revamp its wildfire mitigation strategy. It has applied to the Union of BC Municipalities for some funding to help offset the $90,000 bill to create a new plan.
The last Wildfire Mitigation Strategy was created in 2005, when the city was full of dead, red pine, which posed s forest fire risk. When the City’s Community Forest licence was relinquished in 2014, 44,000 cubic metres of dead pine had been removed for civic properties. But that plan is a dozen years old and the landscape has changed.
“Zoom ahead to 2017, we dealt with the problems of the past two decades, but now, instead of seeing the risk from the Mountain Pine Beetle, we’re actually seeing comnmunities actively going through these tragedies,” says Councillor Garth Frizzell.
He cites Slave Lake, Fort McMurray and, most recently, the Cariboo. The end goal is “to plan out what the next decade is going to look like.”