On July 22, a wildfire broke out near Sooke Potholes Regional Park, and today it continues to burn inside a 230 hectare area. Since August 8, firefighting crews on the ground and in the air have helped reclassify the status of the fire as “under control,” meaning the fire is not projected to spread beyond the current perimeter.
The blaze, called the Old Man Lake Wildfire by BC Wildfire service, is suspected to have been human-caused. For the past few weeks, community residents in Sooke and beyond faced the stress of potential evacuation, poor air quality and the uncertainty of the fire-caused devastation to local parks and the environment. And community members were advised to stay out of Shawnigan Lake as aircraft scooped water from the lake to help fight the fire.
The fire prompted many community members to ask a broader question — what is the impact of wildfires on our watershed and environment?
Last week, forest and watershed ecologist Erik Piikkila helped answer this question during a long walk through Stocking Creek Park in Saltair with Discourse reporter Jordan Kawchuk.
Piikkila is known to some community members as a “forest encyclopedia” and has worked in and studied forestry throughout his whole professional life. Today, he works with environmental NGOs, First Nations, companies, governments and educators to understand and plan for the future of our forests.
Piikkila talked about the effects of wildfire on watersheds, “good and bad” burning and what a positive future for healthy watersheds requires.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Read more watershed stories in our deep dive, Downstream: The Discourse investigates solutions for Cowichan Valley water.
Jordan Kawchuk: You have such an encyclopedic knowledge of forests [and] a diverse take on this specialty area.
Erik Piikkila: I’m sort of an information aggregator, and I try to figure out what science can apply on the ground and what solutions they will lead us to. And then I take everyday forestry knowledge and techniques to see if we can modify them and use them in a more ecological way to restore these ecosystems and to do forestry differently — to actually do it really sustainably.
JK: There are good fires and bad fires, correct?
EP: For more than 100 years, we have been told by Smokey The Bear that fire is bad. But a good fire is the right fire, in the right location, at the right intensity, doing the right [restorative] job and creating ecological goods and services. It’s pyrodiversity. All these bad effects that are happening now from fires are at a huge, catastrophic level — especially when they enter urban areas. But if we had frequent fires that were low and medium intensity, then we’d be getting more of the ecological benefits and less catastrophic fires.
We need to bring in the First Nation traditional ecological knowledge and marry that with Western science — cultural burning, restoration and prescribed burning. Because we’ve been suppressing fires in a big way since the “Big Burn” of 1910,” we’re behind schedule in those good fires. So, along with over 100 years of fire suppression, we’ve also had over 100 years of forest growth and vegetation growth in these forests that have become the fuel for fires.
Sidebar: Why some fires are actually good
According to reporting from The Narwhal, the method of setting fires to fight and prevent wildfires comes from decades of research and “thousands of years of Indigenous science.”
From the forest’s perspective, fire is as essential as water. Here’s why:
Forest fires revitalize plants, trees and mushrooms by releasing nutrients into the soil and opening up the forest canopy to sunlight. Some species of trees even need fire to open their cones to release seeds. All kinds of wildlife like elk and bees then follow.
Without regular fire, forests become overgrown and unhealthy as trees become crowded and choked of sunlight. Unhealthy trees become prone to epidemics like the pine beetle and parasitic plants like dwarf mistletoe — all of which are flammable “ticking time bombs,” according to fire ecologist Robert Gray. These forests are more prone to megafire. That’s the term for an extreme fire that’s burned more than 100,000 acres. (Roughly the city of Kingston, Ontario). These are the kinds of fires that are on the rise.
(From a 2018 Discourse newsletter)
JK: Can you give me an example of the crucial link between forests and watersheds?
EP: Here’s one. [A Washington State study] found that if a riparian forest was left to shade a stream, it will keep the stream temperature cool. These days, stream temperatures in the summertime and nearly everywhere are plus 25 C, which is a lethal temperature for fish. Having an intact riparian forest will cool, shade and keep the waters cool, and make sure that they don’t reach lethal temperatures. The shade of a riparian forest is especially crucial for the small but mighty mountain top wetlands.
Sidebar: The importance of riparian ecosystems
Riparian ecosystems are made up of the transitional areas between water and land. They have characteristics of both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, such as fallen trees that are both on the land and in the water or fish carcasses that have been deposited on land. They also include animals that are both on the land and in the water, such as beavers or otters.
“Riparian ecosystems are considered the most important ecosystem of all the different types out there,” says professional forrester Heather Pritchard. “It just contains a very special structure and functionality that benefits not only water quality and fish habitat, but it tends to be an extremely important habitat for wildlife.”
(From The Discourse’s 2023 story, New research points to solutions for Koksilah and Chemainus watershed health)
JK: What exactly is a watershed?
EP: A watershed is a collection of land with aquatic areas. It will have rivers, headwaters, mountain ranges and forests all mixed together doing their magic to guide the flow of water from the very mountaintops down to the ocean. Humans interrupted that flow. Our forest management, in particular clear cutting, interrupts that flow. Old growth used to slow down water, so much that water would take days, weeks, months and years to filter down and recharge aquifers. But now water runs on the surface and within a couple of hours from the mountaintop, it’s already down to the ocean.
JK: So then, what impacts do wildfires have on watersheds?
We used to call them megafires, but really they’ve gone to giga-fires because they’re absolutely catastrophic. So the impacts now are that these fires are completely burning out everything. The ground is getting baked super hard so that seeds from vegetation can’t get reestablished anymore. After these fires end with all the tons of ash, if you have a rain event, then you’ve got all these metal compounds being released because of the burning process and that’s washing into the streams and out in the watershed.
JK: And that affects drinking water?
Yes. Because of a rain on ash event, those heavy metals and other toxic compounds could go into places like Shawnigan Lake and into the Goldstream watershed, and that’s where people [could encounter impacts on drinking water.].
JK: What other effects or tangible impacts do we see from forest fires?
EP: With a fire, the land is going to get hotter because there’s no vegetation, right? Then there’s a risk of drought. And if it burns hot enough, there’s going to be no vegetation coming back. So in those shady, cool places (like where the trees are around Shawnigan Lake), if a fire goes whipping through there, the houses are going to get nailed, but you’re also going to nail that vegetation. That’s 60, 80 or 100 years away from revegetating and growing up again to get back to the shady, cool conditions it might have been before.
It will hit our pocketbooks too, like we saw in the flooding in the Lower Mainland [in 2021]. The trucks couldn’t get through with the gas, so the gas prices went up because there was no supply. Food prices went up, too. There are impacts on local, regional, provincial and maybe even continental economies.
JK: Funny, my mind was on the ecological impacts of wildfire, but the financial impacts, beyond rebuilding infrastructure, are huge.
EP: It’s going to cost billions of dollars if we go out and restore these ecosystems within the forest.
So, we should bring back prescribed burning. We should create these green swales. We should slow down water wherever we can for watersheds. If we can do all of this, it will cost us less and save us billions and trillions fighting fires and climate change. It cost us a billion dollars to rebuild the Coquihalla highway [after the 2021 floods], so how many times can we rebuild the Coquihalla?
It’s about spending money in the front end so we don’t have to pay through the nose in an emergency — because we don’t have all the money to be trying to put out all these fires, to repair from the flooding, to bring people to safety and then rebuild again exactly the same way. We are setting ourselves up for the very same thing.
JK: What can be done to ensure the safety of our watersheds in relation to fires? As individuals and as a larger community?
EP: On a personal level, just use common sense. Everybody on their private properties can do some things. Prune trees that have green branches close to the ground. A ground fire could grab those branches and climb that tree and then get up to the top. We want to avoid what’s called a canopy fire. Look at what’s on your forest floor around your house, too. Does your forest have a lot of small branches that look like they could be piled into a bonfire? Do you have a big pot of firewood or kindling lying in the forest around the house? The main thing is to be smart and proactive, not reactive, and to be educated, well informed and not base decisions on fear. Cutting it all down is the wrong answer. We want to be cooling and keeping the shade. We want to keep the moisture that forests provide.
On a bigger scale, what it’s going to take is for people to be working together. Everybody — politicians, citizens, scientists, foresters and loggers. By working together, we’re going to end up doing forestry differently and more ecologically.
If humans are the smartest animal on the planet, then now’s the time to use our brain power, innovation, collaboration and learning from the past to create new knowledge and solutions for the 21st century.
Resources to learn more:
POLIS Wildfire Resilience Project
From The Narwhal: The healing power of fire
From The Discourse in 2021: As wildfires burn, here’s how you can get prepared and stay safe
From The Discourse in 2018: Newsletter: Why big wildfires lead to bad floods.
The Discourse’s series on solutions for the Koksilah and Cowichan River watersheds
