Making fire your friend – The Globe and Mail

anuary 8, 2024

Near the Aq’am First Nation in November, B.C.-based fire ecologist Bob Gray looks out at forests destroyed by a wildfire four months earlier. The danger to populated areas could have been worse if not for a prescribed burn in April on some other Aq’am land.

The fire crackled to life around 1:16 p.m. on July 17, about 12 kilometres northeast of Cranbrook in southeastern British Columbia.

The BC Wildfire Service called it N11805, or the St. Mary’s River wildfire, after the river that winds nearby. The blaze raced through parched bunchgrass and up ponderosa pines, throwing embers along the way. It roared into the First Nations community of Aq’am, where local residents and Cranbrook Fire Department personnel raced from door to door, telling residents to flee.

Driven by strong winds, the fire destroyed seven homes in Aq’am within hours. In the days that followed, it burned hot enough to sterilize soil. It put more than 500 homes under evacuation alert and sent plumes of choking smoke into the summer sky. But the St. Mary’s fire is also notable for what it didn’t burn. Months before the blaze, in April, Aq’am – with support from the wildfire service and the Cranbrook and Kimberley fire departments – had carried out a prescribed burn on its biggest reserve, Kootenay 1, a swath of forest and pasture that covers about 75 square kilometres just east of the Canadian Rockies International Airport.