Decades of work to safeguard the community of Jasper against the threat of wildfires is being widely hailed for saving the town from total destruction.
During a news conference Monday, federal officials and the town’s mayor applauded the work of firefighters and decades of parks staff in helping to prevent further damage to the historic townsite.
“This is a success,” Mayor Richard Ireland said in a news conference Monday. “We fortified our community and I credit Parks Canada for the work that they did on the landscape to protect our town.
“When the attack came, those defences worked,” said Ireland, who lost his own home to the flames. “We suffered casualties, absolutely, and it is so incredibly hurtful, but we did hold our ground.”
One week ago, 25,000 visitors and residents were ordered to flee the park as fires burning to the north and south flared dangerously amid high winds and dry conditions. On Wednesday, flames crossed the south edge of town, consuming entire neighbourhoods. By morning, one-third of the town’s structures were in ashes.
Early estimates suggest the wildfire could cost the insurance industry up to $700 million, making it one of the most expensive wildfire disasters in Canadian history.
Despite the losses and the daunting rebuild ahead, Ireland said things could have been much worse without years of preventative work including the thinning out of diseased forests and prescribed burns.
No one was harmed and the majority of the structures in the community remain standing.
“They …saved 70 per cent of our town, ” he said. “They did that because of their work on the ground, and they did that because of the wisdom and foresight that they had to create those defences for us.”
‘Hell on Earth’
During Monday’s news conference, Ron Hallman, Parks Canada president and CEO, said crews on the frontline faced “hell on Earth” conditions, despite having every resource needed to fight the fire.
The wall of flames they faced was unstoppable, he said.
“The fire was 300 metres high, 100 metres above the trees, projecting burning pine cones and debris,” he said.
“There is nothing any human on Earth, or any piece of equipment, could have done standing in front of that wall of fire that would have allowed them to stop it. It’s just not possible.”
Hallman said the agency has been conducting prescribed burns in the park since 1996 and that a FireSmart program has been in effect since 2003.
Hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest had been infested with pine beetle, however, and it simply wasn’t possible to remove them all, he said.
But, like Ireland, he said the park was in a good state of readiness after the decades of work to protect the townsite and mitigate the risk posed by forests left tinder-dry by infestations of mountain pine beetles.
Work began in 2003
Work to fire-smart the community began in 2003 with regular prescribed burns and the installation of sprinkler systems in critical areas.
“Parks Canada and our partners have done everything we reasonably could have done to reduce fire risk over many years and to be prepared for what may come.”
Timothy Kenny, a spokesperson for Parks Canada, said the sections of forest near town that were hardest hit by the pine beetles, had been cleared out. Much of that work had been done along the southern outskirts of the community.
The extreme volatility of the fire made all those efforts ineffective, he said.
“This was not something that caught us blind-sided,” he said.
Meanwhile, crews are working to ensure the community is not damaged by the flames twice. The fire continues to burn out of control and remains a threat to the historic townsite.
In a statement issued late Sunday, Parks Canada said firefighters are making progress in strengthening fireguards that will help slow the spread of the flames should the fire advance once again.
Cooler, wet weather over the weekend allowed crews to make progress, but temperatures in the area are forecast to rise this week, leaving officials expecting increasingly volatile wildfire activity by Thursday, officials said.
The National gets an up close look at the wildfire damage in Jasper, Alta., the firefighting efforts to save as much of the community as possible and why it’s expected to take so long for residents to return home.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said Monday he has been in close contact with Parks Canada and his provincial counterparts in Alberta about the wildfire and financial assistance for evacuees.
He said the rapid evacuation of the park a week ago was a testament to the high level of co-ordination between all levels of government in managing the crisis.
“Parks Canada has been taking care of Jasper National Park for almost a century,” he said.
“And to think that, over all those decades, we would not have deployed all of the resources necessary to try and do everything that is humanly possible to protect a town from a forest fire is simply not true.”
“The fact that we were able to protect 70 per cent of the town speaks to all of those measures we have put in place over the years and frankly, decades.”
Guilbeault said the community is now being prepared for a staged re-entry, although there is no clear timeline for a return.
All active fires in the townsite have been extinguished, Guilbeault said.
As cooler wet weather moved in over the weekend, crews were busy on several fronts. The Jasper Skytram Road was widened with bulldozers to create a wider control line on Whistlers Mountain to protect the community.
Meanwhile, a 12-inch high sprinkler line along the fireguard, which will protect Jasper from fire spread from the west or north, is nearly complete.
Crews have been mopping up wildfires near buildings and infrastructure at risk. Ontario firefighters attacked the north line on the Palisades bluffs. Troops with the Canadian Armed Forces worked on mopping up spot fires near the northwest side of town, Parks Canada said.
An estimated 358 out of 1,113 structures in the townsite about 365 kilometres west of Edmonton, were destroyed. In a new report, credit rating agency DBRS Morningstar said it believes potential insured losses from the disaster could eclipse those incurred in the 2011 wildfire in Slave Lake, Alta., which — adjusted for inflation — reached about $700 million.
The only fire that topped that disaster was the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alta., which resulted in inflation-adjusted insured losses of $4.4 billion and was the costliest wildfire in Canadian history.
The credit rating agency said, as extreme weather events increase in size and frequency, it’s driving up the number of severe weather-related losses across the country, putting insurers and claimants under increasing strain.
It’s still too early to predict whether the 2024 wildfire season will be comparable with 2023, which marked the “most active and destructive” wildfire season on record, the agency said.
As the fire spread and ripped through the townsite, it eventually merged with the fire north of Jasper The two fires, as well as the Utopia wildfire near Miette Hot Springs, make up a cluster called the Jasper Wildfire Complex.
The flames have consumed an estimated 32,000 hectares, making it the largest wildfire the park has seen in over a century.
It’s unclear when the town’s roughly 5,000 residents will be allowed to return home or when the park gates will be re-opened to visitors. Officials have said the fire could burn for months and may remain a danger to the community for weeks.
