Williams Lake is working on a plan to help mitigate the city's risk from wildfires, and this plan will be much more than looking at where to remove vegetation.
According to Lorena Tillotson, a wildfire risk reduction planner with Forsite Consultants, clearing forest fuels is just one aspect of making a community more resilient in the face of wildfire.
Tillotson started work last fall on developing a Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan (CWRP) for the city.
While the plan does include fuel management treatments on municipal land, it is much more than removing vegetation from public property.
Also, fuel management was already the focus of a 2019 Community Wildfire Protection Plan done by Ken Day and Mike Simpson, which covered a larger area.
The new plan will provide a five-year action plan for the city itself, detailing the wildfire risk to the city, taking into account all seven of the FireSmart disciplines, and developing action items around each one.
"Education is now the number one FireSmart discipline," said Tillotson, who helps the city secure funding for this work and is partway through developing the detailed plan.
The seven FireSmart disciplines are: education, legislation and planning, development considerations, interagency cooperation, cross-training (which involves things like training for structural firefighters on fighting wildfires or how fire incident management teams work), emergency planning and vegetation management.
"They've just identified that there are other pieces to the puzzle, so the focus has just shifted," explained Tillotson, who had helped look at the Crown land surrounding the city prior to this for the forest district.
The funding for the resiliency planning comes through the Union of BC Municipalities (UBCM) Community Resiliency Investment program, a fund started in 2018 by the provincial government to support local governments in reducing the risk of wildfires and mitigate potential impacts.
Williams Lake has been pursuing funding through the program for a number of years and in order to continue to receive funding, must have a Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan in place.
So far, the city of Williams Lake has received $1,769,562 in grants through the funds from 2019 to 2024, though there were no grants from the program in 2021.
In 2024, the city received the largest amount yet from the program towards 2025 projects, with a grant of $610,387. The funds will go towards fuel mitigation, FireSmart education within the city, and to fund the new FireSmart Coordinator position for the city, filled by Taya Vanderkop-Girard.
Tillotson said the plan should be completed this fall and Vanderkop-Girard will now be taking on implementing the action items identified in the plan.
She said a huge part of the work Vanderkop-Girard will be doing will involve property owner education.
For Tillotson, she will be continuing other wildfire risk reduction work for the city, including finishing the Westridge/Golf Course fuel management work reducing the forest fuel loading adjacent to those developments. This work is mostly on Crown land and is separate from the CWRP. Much of the work has been completed by Borland Creek Logging, part of Sugar Cane Development Corporation.
The project included the removal of some trees to reduce the overstory, thinning and pruning to reduce the understory, with all of the surface fuels and logging debris going to Atlantic Power's local electricity-generating biomass plant. More hand treatment work will still take place, with some pile burning taking place when conditions allow for safe burning in the fall and winter.
She will also be overseeing work to complete a hand treatment above Tower Crescent though the summer with piles planned to be burned again the following fall and winter as conditions allow as well. Borland Creek Logging will once again be the contractor working on this project to reduce fire hazard.
