Kamloops crews get head start on wildfire prevention in the snow

A little bit of snow isn't stopping crews in Kamloops from getting a head start on wildfire mitigation.

City staff have been limbing trees, cleaning up forest floors and cutting down weak trees on city and Crown land to reduce wildfire fuel.

"Essentially what we do is we remove the understory," project supervisor Nathan O'Reilley told CBC's Jenifer Norwell. "We remove the ground fuels in the region, and the dead trees, and we retain the larger diameter trees."

Kirsten Wourms, natural resources crew leader for the City of Kamloops, said a forest should naturally have a small ground fire every 15 to 20 years to clean up dead brush and weak trees. If that doesn't happen, the entire ecosystem in that forest becomes unhealthyas dead brush piles up.

Unhealthy forests provideadditional fuel for fires to tear through an area, and give fires the potential to travel up into the trees, rather than stay on the ground.

"We're going through and we're mimicking what fire would have done," she said.

Wourms said a contractor has been surveying land within 100 to 200 metres of buildings and residences to find out which forests need to be cleaned up ahead of wildfire season, as part of the City of Kamloops' Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which was last re-evaluated last in 2016.

The wildfire protectionplan was developed because of Kamloops' dry climate and the number of houses close to grasslands and forests; in 2016 the city had identified at least 4,200 homes that could be at risk in the event of a wildfire.

Although it takes a little longer, crews do all their cleaning up by hand no large machines have gone into the forests because they would cause too much damage.

The clean-up is expected to be finished by the end of March. Once that's done, they'll begin maintenance work in city forests.

"We see all the scary pictures from all over where these fires are going through and if we can do something to reduce that it's a great feeling," Wourms said.

"It's just rewarding knowing that we're helping clean up these areas," O'Reilley added.