Tag: Forest fires

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Cottage Life

Lingering tornado debris sparks wildfire concerns in Tweed, Ont.

Photo by @vaughanweather/Twitte

It’s been nine months since a tornado tore through the Municipality of Tweed, Ont., north of Belleville, and yet the surrounding forests are still littered with downed trees and matted brush—prime conditions for a wildfire.

“You get a lightning strike, or you get a hot brake shoe coming off a vehicle, or a discarded cigarette, and you’ve got a Fort McMurray-level disaster here,” says Sandor Johnson, owner of the Potter Settlement Artisan Winery in Tweed.

Right now, Tweed’s fire risk status is high. And if the weather remains warm and dry, the municipality may introduce a burn ban. “All it takes is one ember to lift up and hit a dry spot,” says Sean Porter, Tweed’s fire prevention officer. “And before you can run and grab a rake or a bucket of water, it’s already outside the control of one individual.” 

Just last week, a transport truck broke down and caught fire at the end of Potter Settlement Road. 

And the day before that, Tweed’s fire department put out a run-away blaze a few kilometres from the tornado-damaged area.

“It was a matter of minutes before the fire just started running,” Porter says of the fire. “If that had happened 15 minutes to the west, we’d probably still be there. It’s a tinderbox over there.” 

The area affected by the tornado is so thick with downed trees that Porter says if a wildfire started, it would be unsafe to send in firefighters. Instead, the municipality would need to rely on water bombers.

Tweed has negotiated a five-year contract with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) to be covered by the ministry’s water bombing planes between April to November’s fire season. The service will cost the municipality $6,500 per year.

The water bombers, however, are generally based out of Dryden and Sudbury in Northern Ontario, meaning that if a wildfire did start, it could be an hour or two before the planes arrived. The other issue is that the swamps, puddles, and gullies that Tweed’s fire department typically draws from when fighting fires are low this spring. “It’s gone too fast,” Porter says. “We didn’t get a deep enough freeze this year, so a lot of the surface snow is just absorbed right back into the ground.”

After the tornado touched down on July 24, 2022, residents cleared trees and brush from private land. But the surrounding Crown land has been left mostly untouched. Fallen trees clog rivers and areas once used for hunting are now too dangerous to enter, according to a letter sent to the MNRF from Bob Mullin, Warden of Hastings County.

Tweed has been trying to bring in professional tree removal services since the tornado first hit, but the municipality lacked the funding to afford it. Council petitioned the provincial government for financial aid, warning about flood and wildfire threats from the downed trees. But Tweed was met with a lack of communication from both the MNRF and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH).

It wasn’t until March 20, 2023, eight months after the tornado, that the provincial government provided Tweed with funding to support clean-up efforts. The municipality received $1.2 million to remove fallen trees, clear debris from rivers, and start reforesting.

As part of this funding, residents with fallen trees within 30 metres of a structure on their property are being asked to submit a property access waiver and release form to have the fallen trees removed. This is intended to create a firebreak so that if a wildfire did start, it wouldn’t have any easy path to people’s homes.

But Johnson points out that most property owners did this within the first few days after the tornado. “This was the first thing that people did when the trees came down. They cut them around their house and their driveways,” he says. Instead, Johnson feels the municipality should be clearing any debris within 60 metres of people’s homes and businesses. “You get a forest fire and your house is like popcorn. It’s just going to burn up. Thirty metres is not enough.”

To keep your property safe from a wildfire, Porter says you don’t want cedar and pine trees within 10 metres of a structure because they catch fire easily. He also suggests trimming branches within six feet of the ground as they can be reached by a grass fire, which would in turn cause your structure to catch faster.

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Cottage Life

Cottage Q&A: How many wildfires do cigarettes cause?

By Thichaa/Shutterstock

This summer, near our cottage, there were a few fires where cigarette butts were deemed to be the cause. I’m concerned that some people on our lake don’t understand the dangers of improper cigarette butt disposal. How should people be disposing of used cigarettes at the lake, where the vegetation can get tinder-dry in the summer?—Jolene Macfarlane, via email 

You have a valid concern. Cigarettes don’t account for the majority of fires, but they certainly account for some of them. In the summer of 2019, for example, seven Vancouver Island fires over the course of seven days were attributed to discarded cigarette butts. 

Part of the problem is that a butt can appear as if it’s extinguished, but if it lands on burnable material, it can still ignite. A stubbed-out cigarette that someone tosses from a car window, assuming it’ll land harmlessly on the pavement, could bounce, roll, and end up in vegetation growing on the side of the road. For obvious reasons, “the risk for a discarded cigarette to start a forest fire or a grass fire goes up when we haven’t had much precipitation, and the ground layer is more dry than normal,” says Michael Peake, the fire prevention officer for the town of Bracebridge, Ont. Certain plant material—such as dry peat moss—is particularly good at “insulating” the cigarette. “We’ve been to numerous fires caused by smokers’ materials extinguished in a planter containing dry peat moss,” says Peake. “We’ve seen peat moss insulate for seven hours before the cigarette started a fire.”

13 quick safety tips to prevent fires at the cottage

If you’re worried about forest fires in particular, the good (er, sort of) news is that stats show that cigarettes are not anywhere near the most common source of wildfires. In Canada, about 50 per cent of wildfires are caused by lightning strikes, says Mike Flannigan, the director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta. The other 50 per cent are “human-caused”—for instance, campfires, ATV activity, burning debris, and in some cases, arson. 

Smokers have no control over lightning, or hot ATV tailpipes, or arsonists. They do have control over their butts. If you have cottage guests who smoke, discard their ashes and used cigarettes into a jar or a metal bucket with a lid, and keep it outside, says Peake. “The lid takes away the oxygen to the cigarette, putting it out almost instantly.” When it’s time to empty the bucket, wet the contents to make certain that everything is extinguished. “Then it should be safe for disposal in the garbage,” says Peake.

How to dispose of your fireplace ash

Time for a public service announcement! If a smoker is outside somewhere in the woods, with no ashtray, bucket, or jar, “I would suggest finding a puddle or a hard surface, like a rock, to extinguish the cigarette,” says Peake. “Ideally, detaching the filter and taking it back to a place where you can properly dispose of it is the best idea. Filters aren’t compostable and have plastics that will not degrade.” Never butt a cigarette on the forest floor, he says. “Dry needles, grass, and leaves may combust after you’ve left the area.” 

Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.

Categories
Cottage Life

How BC cows are helping fight wildfires

Photo by Cameron Watson/ Shutterstock

They look like regular cattle munching grass. But for a few weeks in late May and early June, 30 cows and their calves are doubling as wildfire control specialists. They’re grazing 45 hectares of public land near the edge of Kelowna—and protecting the BC city, one bite at a time.

The herd is “feeding on the spring grass, and ideally knocking down the fine fuel hazard at the same time,” says the city’s urban forestry supervisor, Andrew Hunsberger. The goal is to shield a southeastern neighbourhood from wildfires like the one that killed two people and burned 151 homes and businesses last summer near Lytton, BC.

“It’s similar to when you keep mowing your lawn. The grass stays green instead of maturing and going dormant,” says Amanda Miller, a BC range ecologist studying the province’s “targeted grazing” program. During three or four few weeks of grazing cows remove about 30 per cent of the grassy fuel in these grassland and open forest areas—making fires far less intense if they ignite.

The province launched the “targeted grazing” pilot project in 2019 with a $500,000 contribution to the project’s organizer, the BC Cattlemen’s Association. Since then ranchers have grazed areas near Cranbrook, Peachland, and Summerland, and the program expanded to Kelowna this year. To concentrate cows in key areas, the association has installed fencing, water troughs, and self-closing spring-loaded gates so that people can enter the zone to use trails.

Because cows cover rough terrain and work for food, Hunsberger says grazing makes a good fit with other fire control measures, including forest thinning, prescribed fire, and landscaping around homes and cottages. “If this goes well, we’re hoping we can expand the program,“ he adds. “After the big fire season last year, the idea of finding innovative ways to reduce the fire threat seems to appeal to people.”

How to keep your cottage safe from wildfires 

New Canadian app detects and tracks forest fires in real time