Spring is here, although you can be forgiven for not noticing, as winter failed to make much of an impact, and it feels as if spring arrived a long time ago. But no, it’s really spring, which brings with it the dawn chorus of birds, the return of kids to the skateboard park across the road from the Journal office, and the ritual flushing of the sewer lines. Can street sweeping be far behind?
In this region we also greeted the return of spring with the Cache Creek Volunteer Fire Department responding to its first landscape fire of the season, a small blaze alongside Highway 1 that was apparently started by something tossed from a passing vehicle and (thankfully) mostly put out by bystanders by the time the fire crew arrived. Elsewhere in B.C., the first report of the year of a human-caused wildfire in the Okanagan came over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, when a blaze near Lumby — apparently a burn pile that got away from someone — grew to three hectares before being contained and extinguished by BC Wildfire Service crew members.
The fires come at a time when the province’s overall snowpack level is at its lowest point for this time of year — 66 per cent of normal — in two decades, when mid-March temperatures in the Okanagan are five to 10 degrees higher than usual, and when the BC River Forecast Centre is warning of a high probability of drought this spring and summer. Coming on top of two previous years of drought conditions, it means that fire season this year is apt to be brutal.
There’s little anyone can do about lightning-caused wildfires, but preventing human-caused ones is well within our abilities. Why, then, do we see — year in and year out — hundreds of wildfires caused by people, despite expensive (and extensive) ad campaigns, warnings from a wide variety of organizations, and education efforts about making people more aware of fire safety? Of the 2,245 wildfires in B.C. last year, 25 per cent — around 561 — were human-caused, which is roughly … oh, about 561 too many.
Every year we hear the same depressing stories, about people who misjudged conditions and let slash burning get away from them, or who insisted on having campfires despite bans, or who walked away from fires before they were out, or tossed cigarette butts out of car windows, or otherwise engaged in behaviours that are stupid, ignorant, selfish, or some combination of all three.
Take the campfire ban-defiers, whose mantra seems to be “You’re not the boss of me!” It would be bad enough if they were at least responsible in their selfishness, although (at least in my experience) these two qualities seldom go hand-in-hand. In their own minds they’re probably Grizzly Adams or Davy Crockett, hardened backwoodsmen who can start a fire using a broken shard of glass and some dried moss, but in reality they’re often the type who think that the best way to start and maintain a campfire is with large quantities of accelerant, and are completely unprepared for the resulting conflagration.
And please, please, please do not get me started on the people — usually, but not always, from the big city — who react to a campfire ban as if they have been stripped of a basic human right and they’re going to be appealing this all the way to the United Nations. “But it’s not really camping if we can’t have a fire!” they whine, while failing to acknowledge that it’s also not really camping if you do it in a 35-foot RV that has interior and exterior TVs, a linen closet, a fireplace (no kidding), a king-size bed, office space, a satellite dish, power awnings, and air conditioning.
“Hope for the best but plan for the worst,” the old saying goes. Ensuring that we don’t do anything to make this fire season any worse than it has to be seems a pretty solid plan, and something well within the grasp of every one of us. All it needs is a little common sense, and our firefighters will thank you.