BANFF – Banff’s former fire chief is calling on Banff town council to implement mandatory initiatives for homeowners and businesses to help protect the national park community from the threat of a future wildfire.
While the Town of Banff proposes changes to the design guidelines to mandate use of fire-resistant building and landscaping materials, former fire chief Silvio Adamo said he strongly urges council to implement a retroactive bylaw requiring homes to meet FireSmart standards.
“That is the best line of defence … it’s something we just have to implement; it’s going to save our community,” said Adamo during a council meeting on Oct. 15.
“A number of years ago council asked me to look into this, a report was brought, and the decision was to not proceed.”
Fears over the threat of wildfire to Banff and other communities in the Bow Valley have intensified following the out-of-control blaze that ripped through Jasper this past summer, forcing evacuation of approximately 5,000 residents and 20,000 tourists on July 22.
Despite heroic efforts of firefighters, walls of flames reaching 100 metres high ripped through the national park on the night of July 24, destroying one-third of the Jasper townsite’s buildings and burning about 32,722 hectares.
Adamo, who had 35 years with Banff’s fire department, including 16 years as fire chief, said Parks Canada and the Town of Banff have done a lot of work to reduce fuel load in and around the Banff townsite, but the onus must shift to private homeowners to do a better job with FireSmart.
“We’ve encouraged and we’ve incentivized, but the fact remains that like Jasper, like Fort McMurray, it’s not the big wall of flames that comes and wipes out your community, it is embers raining in and igniting structures,” he said.
“That causes another structure to catch on fire and another one and another – that’s what we call a conflagration – and then it’s almost impossible to stop without bulldozing things down and creating the barriers.”
Adamo was deployed to Jasper for two weeks as part of Canada Task Force 2’s incident command team, arriving about 12 hours after the fire hit the townsite.
As part of the team, he had a chance to see the impacts of the wildfire from both the air and the ground.
“I could see many examples of structure ignition caused by embers, and the path of the wildlife and conflagration and how it travelled through the community,” he said.
Marie-Pierre Rogeau, a longtime Banff resident with a PhD in wildfire science and who is well-versed in wildland urban interface fire issues, echoed much of what Adamo had said in terms of doing a better job of FireSmarting properties in town.
She said that has to apply to not only private residences, but also commercial businesses and municipally-owned properties and facilities, noting she saw first-hand during a recent visit to Jasper that some areas that survived “you can tell that FireSmart did play a role.”
“The downside for us is that we are not at the same level of preparedness in terms of our fuels,” Rogeau said.
“If we had have had the same fire, I think that 75 per cent of the town would have probably burned down.”
Rogeau said there is new science that shows ember distance of up to two kilometres is outdated.
“Historically, ember spotting was recorded as far as nine km. In recent years, maximum spotting distances have reached 17 km,” she said.
Rogeau said there is a false notion that embers can only start fires from the ground up.
“A flaming debris can land on branches of spruce trees and ignite the latter. Hence, trimming only lower branches may not be sufficient,” she said.
She said there should be zero combustible material within 1.5 metres from a building, and 15 centimetres up from the bottom of walls of a building.
“Embers can ignite wood material at the base of walls, infiltrate through soffits and other poorly sealed openings,” she said.
In 2023, FireSmart Alberta was invited by the Town of Banff to conduct a third-party scan of the municipality’s program, and provided a community scorecard that graded Banff on each of the 10 categories in FireSmart.
According to a Town of Banff administrative report, Banff fared well overall, but one of the areas that needed to be addressed was the category of use of bylaws or plans to require the use of fire-resistant building and landscaping materials, and FireSmart maintenance practices.
The report will be before council on Oct. 28 for discussions on proposed draft amendments to the land use bylaw in order to update the design guidelines and bylaw with a focus on amendments related to FireSmart principles.
Under proposed changes to the design guidelines, there would be a list of approved plant species and a list of prohibited species.
In addition, new or replacement roofs must use Class A, meaning they must be able to withstand severe fire exposure. Standing seam roofs, like metal, would be permitted with aesthetic limitations.
Administration will likely be asked to review other Town of Banff legislation that contributes to achieving FireSmart, such as the community standards bylaw, and return with proposed amendments.
According to the administrative report, design guidelines play a role in wildfire risk mitigation in conjunction with other policy tools that may be macro in scale like landscape-scale fireguards or micro such as seasonal fuel removals on a residential lot.
“Having all these measures aligned will result in the most effective defence against the high probability of wildfire impacting the community,” according to the report.
Administration is also recommending changes to the land use bylaw, which changes the wildfire risk zone map of various neighbourhoods in the townsite from low, medium and high areas to have the entire town considered a high-risk zone.
“This will result in a uniform regulatory approach to wildfire risk and tree species selection across the entire community, and reflecting the spatial reach of wildfire activity seen in recent events in western Canada,” according to the report.
Rogeau said the Town of Banff should also map out what a worst-case scenario wildfire could look like for Banff, noting the municipality’s wildfire preparedness plan does not capture the realities of fast-moving fires, only considering one fire coming from the west.
She encourages the Town to model a wide array of scenarios with single and multiple fires, considering all valley directions and using fire weather input reflecting the new fire and climate realities recently seen.
“A fire in the Upper Spray Valley that would be 30 to 40 km away from Banff incoming at the speed of a bullet train could also split and be a risk or a threat simultaneously with Banff and Canmore … so now you’re stretching your resources to the limit even more and it means for us evacuations to the west,” she said.
“I think things have tremendously changed in the last few years in terms of the hotter, faster fires, and any study that can be done to look at the worst-case scenarios and be prepared for any eventualities is needed,” she added.
“Knowing the range of evacuation times to consider, and based on the wildfire spread scenarios, the second step is to look at traffic flow constraints in town and how it could lengthen and possibly compromise the possibility of a full evacuation within a very short time frame.”