As dry brush crackled and smoke curled upward, there was a palpable feeling of satisfaction among firefighters gathered near Cranbrook in the Canadian province of British Columbia. It was a sunny day in April, and if the weather held, the multiagency team hoped to quickly finish a prescribed burn on 42 hectares (104 acres) of land adjacent to the tiny Rocky Mountains International Airport — an effort meant to protect the facility in case of a major wildfire event. Some crew members walked diagonal lines along the fire front, lighting the grass with drip torches. Some stood along the burn’s perimeter with water bladders and hoses to douse errant sparks. Another monitored wind speed and direction, alert and ready to warn of changes. Others looked on, glad to be working with fire instead of against it. “Should’ve bought marshmallows,” one quipped. Last July, when a downed power line sparked a wildfire here, the mood was far different. The St. Mary’s River Fire burned 4,650 hectares (11,490 acres), destroyed homes in the Indigenous ʔaq̓am community, and put the airport and nearly 100 properties under evacuation alert. It took what the BC Wildfire Service calls a full response — water bombers, ground crews, back burning — to control it. But without prescribed burning, things could have been far worse. That spring, three months before the St. Mary’s River Fire, the ʔaq̓am community, part of the Ktunaxa First Nation, intentionally burned a 1,200-hectare (2,965-acre) portion of their reserve. This meant that when the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post As the world burns, can we learn to live with wildfire health risks? first appeared on EnviroLink Network.