By Cheryl Jahn

Local government calling for better fuel management

Aug 21, 2024 | 3:16 PM

PRINCE GEORGE – The Antler Creek fire that forced the evacuations of both Barkerville and Wells was first spotted southwest of Barkerville on July 20th. It was noted early on from local government officials that the conditions with dead wood and tricky terrain made it a challenge to get a handle on that wildfire, a fire the head of Barkerville called a “monster fire.” It was also Al Richmond who noted that the fuel sources that became problematic.

“That whole corridor along the highway from Quesnel to Wells and into Barkerville is lined with dead pine. It’s a bomb waiting to go off.”

He suggests, had there been proper fuel mitigation, the Antler Creek fire would not have taken off to the degree it did.

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“These hundreds of millions of dollars spent on a “monster fire” that was threatening both the community of Wells and Barkerville., so those are all things that we need to do and prioritize. And there’s little point in improving other things in Barkerville if we can’t protect the basic infrastructure.”

But the Minister of Forests Bruce Ralston says the Mountain Beetle epidemic did a lot of damage to BC’s forests and efforts were made to address that.

“Over the last 20 years, the harvesting of the results of the mountain pine beetle where the trees are rendered dead and has been cut, was elevated, raised to and sent and the low stumpage to incent the turning of a lot of that wood.”

But Richmond says the federal government has been “completely absent.”

“I can tell you right now, I’ll be very blunt, the federal government’s completely absent. We’re telling them that we’re a federal government site. There is no federal money, so maybe it’s a matter of going to the feds and saying, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, you need to come up with some money so we can do fire mitigation in there.'”

He says he will be knocking on doors in both Victoria and Ottawa in the near future.