BC Wildfires

[Scooter]

The various fires around Quesnel and Williams Lake are now combining to become a 400,000+ Ha fire. To put that into perspective, that number is larger than the total of all province-wide wildfires combined in every one of the past ten years. On average, about 154,000 Ha burns each year in BC, province-wide.

Story: https://www.kamloopsbcnow.com/watercool ... re_in_B_C/

Some stats: http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safet ... e-averages

[Cyper]

Fires have now burned 1 million hectares in B.C. this summer. At 1600 trees per hectare, we'd need 1.6 billion seedlings to plant it all. Currently we plant about 250 million seedlings per year.

So what's a reasonable estimate of what percentage of this land will be reforested? How much work is this for planters, could this be a planter's market? Who's going to pay for it?

[Scooter]

From today's WFCA Rumour Mill Roundup newsletter:

This Year’s B.C. Fire Season by Some Selected Numbers

The big number, of course, is the area burned which stands at over 1 million hectares and growing. Approximately 145 fires were active this week totaling over 1154 so far this year. This week saw around 3800 firefighters on the fire line or in support. Almost 900 are from out of province with another 1500 at least from contract crews. Since things blew up in June at minimum 2,000 fire fighters have been on the line 14 hours per day seven days a week.

Some other figures and modeling crossed our desk earlier based on the then 900,000, or so hectares burned. The numbers assumed 30% of the area burned is in the timber harvest land base. If we were to plant this area it would require around 326-million seedlings at a cost of $1.20 per seedling including planning, site-prep, etc. That gets us to $391 million in reforestation costs. Natural regeneration is uncertain at this point, but there will be fill planting and possible thinning required to help these stands. And the modeling is out by the ten percent allowing that we are now at 1-million hectares burned. So these estimates and their assumptions may not be that far off.

Once again this year wild fire smoke has been B.C.’s main forest product export measured by the tonne annually. If we total direct and post fire emissions including GHG and others at 900,000 hectares burned the modeling shows 446,661,843 tonnes up in smoke into the atmosphere. If that is beyond comprehension then consider the same burning as energy released. The fire season has been the equivalent of 28,158 Halifax Harbour explosions when the ship Mount Blanc loaded with 2,925 tons of munitions blew up December 6, 1917. To put it in a nuclear perspective the fire season so far is equal to 6,497 August 6, 1945 Hiroshima detonations. And these are some of the immediate numbers. The long-term impacts measurable in terms of economic losses, full restoration costs and community trauma are yet to come.