On Tuesday, May 7 residents of Kimberley were invited to an open house at the Marysville Fire Hall to learn about the Kimberley Fire Department’s Fuels Management Projects scheduled, or already completed, in 2024 and into 2025.
Fire Chief Will Booth was joined by Ian Macek, wildfire technician with the BC Wildfire Service (BCWS).
Booth began by discussing the different fuels management projects before taking some questions from residents.
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Within Kimberley, the Fire Department has completed work on the following:
•The “8th Ave Polygon”: 15 hectares manually treated with slash piles done and burned, with a planned, weather-dependent prescribed burn scheduled for the Fall in the Bench above Florence’s Gully.
•4th Ave: Slash piles to be burned this winter, with plans to move out anything that is available to access by truck.
•”Lovers 2 Project”: An area of 11 to 15 hectares that had a prescribed burn done to it in 2016, with expansion planned to reduce more fails and a maintenance burn on the original burn done in 2016.
•Highway 95A : Fuels management, slash pile treating.
•102-hectare treatment north of the Riverside Campground: 50 per cent already completed, currently waiting for existing slash piles to cure a bit longer so they can be properly burned.
•Forest Crowne West: Small area by the old gravel pit to be used by the Fire Department for prescribed burn training.
•Matthew Creek: 20-hectare burn, seven hectares done last year until weather window was lost. Completed this year.
Residents brought up other issues within Kimberley they had concerns about, for example the section of Wallinger Avenue known locally as “Overwaitea Hill.”
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Booth highlighted the challenges faced by the Fire Department regarding issues like this. All the work they do is grant funded and private land is not able to be treated with those grants. The City of Kimberley does not have the ability to manage residents’ personal property.
“[I ask] what’s our biggest risk and when I look at the city as a whole and I look at old fire maps where it’s actually blown in and challenged the city previously, we have the St. Mary valley with the wind current that blows down the valley and we also have Matthew Creek that has a drainage that comes down here,” Booth explained. “So where we’re really focusing on is the western flank of the city.”
Booth explained the main landscape fuel plan in Kimberley for the next five to six years is to start at the north end of the city’s western flank and work their way down with maintenance burns, hand and mechanical treatments with the idea of buffering that western flank. This allows fire fighters to more safely combat wildfires that spring up in that forested area.
He also talked about how important it is for residents to do their part and make their homes as fire safe as possible.
“It’s how can I make there not be a risk in town?” Booth said. “How can I prevent that ember spread that we saw in Kelowna last year that travelled two kilometres over the lake. How can I make Kimberley more resilient and that’s when I ask the city residents to think FireSmart.
“Small communities in the Kootenays are all faced with the same issue. Wildfire’s a big threat, we have capacity issues, what can we do? We’re going to look to residents to look at their own home and push that FireSmart perspective of this is what you can do and be mindful to work on your own land and your own homes and then engage with your neighbourhood to make your neighbourhood more resilient.”
Booth encouraged residents to start conversations with their neighbours to try and ensure everyone is on the same FireSmart page.
He added he’s seen a bigger push with FireSmart, several of his on-call fire fighters have done the local FireSmart Representative course so they’re now able to help get neighbourhoods on board as well. There is also funding coming down from the Union of BC Municipalities’ Community Resilience Investment funding stream to help support getting FireSmart out there.
