BC's wildfire tactics shift mid-season as drought makes old burn scars unreliable

Prolonged drought conditions are forcing British Columbia's fire tacticians to rethink how they battle blazes in the province's dry and hot Interior, with strategies that worked for decades suddenly becoming unreliable.

Historically, burn scars from previous fires helped crews predict the path of new blazes and gave them natural barriers to slow advancing flames. But this fire season, a sustained drought has upended that assumption. "We are not seeing the same sort of potential benefit of a fire running into a fire if [the burn scar] is more than five, seven, 10 years old," said Cliff Chapman, BC Wildfire Service director of operations.

Chapman pointed to the Pear Lake fire, currently burning in territory torched by the 2017 Elephant Hill fire — one of BC's largest on record. "When I started my career 20-plus years ago, burn scars would give us a 10-to-20-year buffer, especially if it was a high-intensity burn like Elephant Hill that we could then use as a control line," he said. "Today, drought and weather conditions stoked by climate change and warmer and longer summers make those old burned-over areas less reliable."

The new reality is forcing crews to build control lines — long man-made areas with little or no fuel to burn — directly through old burn scars instead of relying on them as natural stopping points. Chapman said the service has already adjusted its tactics accordingly, though he left unspecified what new equipment or techniques are being deployed in response.