Wildfire rehabilitation and recovery activities from the 2017 and 2018 wildfire seasons continue in the Cariboo.
Communications officer with the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development Andrea Klassen said one of the challenges this year is that it’s been quite wet out there.
“That’s good and bad. It means that we’re pushing into a season where often it would be quite dry and heavy machinery would become a wildfire risk, so because of the water that’s not so much an issue this year which means people can keep going but it also does mean that the terrain is a little bit more challenging,” she said.
“Then a lot of it is just how long we can be out there until the snow is out on the ground and you really just can’t do any more work, but you can go quite late some years. I think last year they were still going in December.”
21 Ministry staff and eight contractors make up the rehabilitation team. They’re currently working on a variety of rehabilitation activities including rehabilitating fireguards and water control.
Work was been fully completed on the Kleena Kleene fire.
“We’ll be out there at least again next year,” Klassen said.
“One of the pieces with wildfire recovery is because there is so much land burned in these two fire years that were really unprecedented for BC it does take a little longer to get through all the work, and it’s not just rehab that’s an issue. There’s also a lot of other things that go into recovering from wildfires; there’s replanting of trees which is a much longer project and they’re looking at things like community resiliency, so how do we prevent future wildfires or at least cut down on the risk of the damage they can do to communities.”