Protection plans intended to ready Yukon communities for worsening wildfires
23 January 2024
Published by: https://www.yukon-news.com
CANADA – Community wildfire protection plans in the works across territory — but not for Whitehorse
The Yukon is facing the reality of longer, more intense wildfire seasons by paying special attention to how its communities are prepared, according to fire information officer Mike Fancie with Yukon Wildland Fire Management.
He said that means coming up with community wildfire protection plans for all Yukon communities.
“We need to have strategies in place to reduce wildland fire risk around individual communities in the Yukon,” Fancie said.
“We know that the most important thing for a home’s survivability when a wildfire takes place is the work that happens on the home and in the front yard, but there is also responsibility in the public sector, whether it’s at the municipal or the territorial level, to do the wider level landscape work to reduce risk to clusters of properties or subdivisions.”
Fancie said it’s a task that has been handed down by the minister and a move away from the classic wildfire safety messaging from 20 or 30 years ago around putting out campfires and the like.
“It’s important for us to look ahead to why we need to build our resiliency to wildfires based on the fact that in the Yukon we’ve chosen to live in the boreal forest,” he said.
Fancie hasn’t run into any resistance from communities on the notion of striking up wildfire protection plans, which include prioritizing areas where fuel management should occur and making suggestions to limit the chances that wildland fires will damage structures.
Teslin and Haines Junction already have plans in place.
Plans are in the works for Beaver Creek, Burwash Landing and Destruction Bay, Faro and Watson Lake.
A draft community wildfire protection plan for Dawson City has been recently released. The plan was drafted by a working group composed of local Dawsonites and technical experts from Yukon Wildland Fire Management. Members of the community will have a chance to weigh in on the plan.
A century ago, the community was a gold rush boomtown. Gold continues to be the primary industry in Dawson City and surrounding areas, although the main economic activity is tourism, per the community profile on the Yukon government website. Dawson City is situated on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers. It’s about 536 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse, at the end of the Klondike Highway.
The Yukon Bureau of Statistics estimates the population of Dawson City is 2,370, as of June 2023.
Fancie said Dawson City has a “fairly robust fire regime.” This will remain important because, in the long term, the area is likely to see fires on a regular basis.
“That has always been the case,” he said.
Major wildfires hit the region in the 1960s, per the plan. The area gets significant and frequent fires due to the influence of the Tintina Trench, where lightning storms commonly occur and ignite fires from mid-June to mid-July. Fire risk fluctuates with the seasons.
During the 2023 fire season, the Dawson fire district saw more fires by numbers, at 62, but not by hectares burned compared to other fire districts. Mayo and Old Crow each saw more than double the hectares burned compared to the Dawson fire district last year.
Fancie explained that the working groups consider several factors — weather, landscape, climate change and socioeconomic — when trying to understand a given community’s vulnerability and how to respond.
There are notable distinctions between Dawson City, West Dawson, Moosehide and east of the city near the airport, thus the region has been broken down into groupings for the plan’s purpose. For example, Fancie said a response to a fire on the west side requires crossing the river, which necessitates helicopters flying in.
“When we look at the socioeconomic factors in Dawson, it becomes a bit more complex, and I think that has an influence on how a protection plan gets created because of the way in which the response has to change a little bit, whereas you know, in Whitehorse, you can drive to most places,” he said.
Fancie said that including people from local municipal and First Nation governments, renewable resource councils and others with interest in and knowledge about the land and its relationship to the community when creating the plan is key.
“We ultimately know that the best people to ask about the state of the forest are the people who live in it,” he said. For example, a caribou biologist can bring expertise about how migration patterns are impacted.
“Those types of interventions are really interesting and important in making sure that a plan that gets created actually gets implemented.”
Currently, the working group is “generally on board” with the contents of the plan, he said. The next step will be to hear what other people in the community like and don’t like about the plan before chainsaws and reforestation crews dive in.
The community feedback will be used to tweak the document. The timeline for finalizing the plan depends on the consultation.
The final step will be getting the City of Dawson, Tr’ondek Hwech’in First Nation and Yukon Wildland Fire Management to sign on to the plan, which includes “recommendations” that are agreed upon.
Reducing the risk of wildfires involves things like FireSmart work, developing fuel breaks, prescribed fires and stand conversion, which Fancie said refers to flipping parts of the forest by removing evergreen trees and replacing them with aspen trees.
Fancie added that risk reduction doesn’t mean that risk has been fully eliminated.
“There isn’t necessarily like a finish line when it comes to wildfire resiliency because there’s always going to be some level of risk when we build our communities in the forest,” he said.
“I think that the resiliency of the community is something we can always improve on, especially when we look at more outlying isolated areas. But that’s what the community plan is there to address.”
The City of Whitehorse is the only community that won’t be getting a community wildfire protection plan, Fancie said. That’s because the Yukon’s capital has its own wildfire risk reduction strategy that’s being carried out with the support of Yukon Wildland Fire Management.
“It’s a much larger task when we get to a community of Whitehorse’s size,” Fancie said.
Contact Dana Hatherly at dana.hatherly@yukon-news.com
