By: Eden Chipperfield, News Writer
As of June 28, 3,020 wildfires have burned across Canada this year, impacting nearly 8 million hectares of land. The largest recorded fire in BC’s Donnie Creek is burning across 160 kilometres. With ongoing concerns around summer wildfire season across BC, many question how these climate disasters will continue to affect populations across the province.
On June 20, The Peak attended Empowering Communities to Endure Climate Disasters, a webinar created in partnership with The Tyee, SFU Public Square, and the Climate Disaster Project. The webinar was hosted by investigative journalist Francesa Fionda and featured four speakers that spoke on their experiences as survivors of climate disasters.
Attendees joined from all across Canada, as well as California, to listen to the experiences of the speakers regarding this matter of ongoing climate disaster evacuations. One of the speakers, Susan Dobra, called in from the US and discussed her experience living in Paradise, California. In 2018, a faulty electric transmission ripped through her community, killing 85 people and devastating the area. “I kept thinking of climate change as a future problem until it came and burned down my town,” said Dobra, detailing her experience.
The webinar also highlighted advice from Tyrone McNeil, chair of Emergency Planning Secretariat, Stó:lō Tribal Council president and Tribal Chief, and a member of Seabird Island band. McNeil provided insight on Indigenous approaches to taking care of victims of climate disasters: “Our plan is to move away from the current [Emergency Support Services] methodology to something more holistic,” he said, adding “our model will be building in our traditional foods or traditional ways of looking after each other’s mental and physical health.”
In 2021, Michele Feist and her dog Finn escaped the Lytton fire and relocated to Williams Lake. Two years later, Lytton is still largely rubble and dirt and awaiting assessment to obtain building permits. Feist also mentioned a sincere lack of an evacuation plan when the fire began to burn out of control. “We didn’t get an evacuation alert; we got 20 minutes,” Feist said as she detailed how she left Lytton. Feist and other survivors are advocating for changes in emergency responses to fill in the gaps regarding evacuation plans, including support for stabilizing after relocation.
Tarina Colledge, secretary of the BC Association of Emergency Managers, was involved in the response operations and recovery planning of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire and helped evacuate 88,000 people, including her family. “I now still sleep with my car keys next to my nightstand,” Colledge said, recalling her evacuation.
Attendees asked the speakers if survivors should be trying to go back to “normal” and if collective property should shift. Colledge responded that Canada is geographically different and expansive, making it difficult to implement new policies.
“You’re probably familiar with the 15-minute city concept and the importance of finding ways to stay local,” she said, before emphasizing that this is difficult to achieve when many “live and work in vastly different geographies where public transit is not available.”
“Some of these developments still will build you an idealized structure where you theoretically might be able to find a job, but the jobs that you find are not going to be at the salary necessary to work and live in those compounded structures,” said Colledge.
Francesca Fionda provided an article from The Tyee on how readers can prepare themselves for wildfire season ahead. For more information, readers can visit The Tyee website.
