John Betts will tell you up front he’s not a typical rural homeowner. But neither is his community of Queens Bay typical of rural B.C.
“We’re pretty lucky to live here,” Betts says, on the grounds of his Kootenay property.
Lean and wiry at 73, he has the look of a man who has spent much of his life in the woods. Betts has worked as a logger and tree planter, a silvicultural contractor, and finally as the voice of the silviculture industry in B.C. He’s been the executive director of the Western Forestry Contractors Association since 1995.
His community of Queens Bay, on the rugged and heavily wooded slopes above Kootenay Lake, is certified as a FireSmart neighbourhood, one where residents have been recognized for investing tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of work to protect homes and properties from wildfire.
But these are neighbourhoods, not entire municipalities. One neighbourhood may have been recognized as Fire Smart, while another, a few kilometers or blocks away, has not.
The FireSmart map shows certified neighbourhoods are clustered in the southern interior of B.C.; there are only half a dozen north of Williams Lake, and just one in the Peace River region, a hotspot in fire season. Clearly, this is a work in progress. Remediation at the community level depends on strong local leadership, as well as public acceptance and support.
In the Kootenays, the communities are close-knit, many on the edge of the forest, and there seems to be more buy-in. The Regional District of Central Kootenay says more property owners here have been signing up every year for risk assessments.
“We live in a fire-adapted ecosystem,” Betts says. “Fire belongs here, and we think we do as well. So, the two have to go together somehow. Certainly, making your house less kindling-prone, if you will, is a good thing.”
Fireproofing starts with the basics
FireSmart BC is part of a national network called FireSmart Canada. It’s one of many initiatives launched by the B.C. government after the devastating wildfires of 2003.
The province provides the funding to the FireSmart Committee, which operates at arm’s length from the province and channels money through local governments. The committee includes representatives from agencies such as the BC Wildfire Service, the Office of the Fire Commissioner, the Union of BC Municipalities, First Nations Emergency Services, BC Parks, and Parks Canada.
The B.C. government says $71 million dollars has been distributed through FireSmart to 280 communities since 2019, in a province that has 161 municipalities, more than 200 First Nations communities, and hundreds of unincorporated communities.
Homeowners can ask for a free wildfire risk assessment, do the required work, then apply for a grant to help pay the cost of remediation. Not every FireSmart municipality offers grants, but of those that do, they cover as much as 50 per cent of the cost, up to a maximum of $5,000.
The catch is that fireproofing – or hardening, as it’s often called – often costs far more than that. It may require replacing roofing and siding, doors and windows, soffits and fascia.
But it starts with the basics most homeowners can do on their own: cleaning out rain gutters, raking up twigs and needles, covering firewood, getting rid of flammable vegetation such as juniper shrubs close to the dwelling, and keeping lawns and gardens watered and green.
Betts has done all of that.
“This is mostly deciduous trees in this gully,” he says, gesturing in their direction. “And that gully has been treated and cleaned out…. Ten years ago, this was all littered with larger fuel. Yes, it’s at about the point where I’ve got to come back and do a lighter broom. We lifted a lot of the limbs up, got it so it would not contribute to generating heat to ignite this. So that’s enough to calm a fire down.”
Couple create a ‘British cottage effect’
Betts and his wife, Anneke Betts-van Hamburg, live in a rambling post and beam house with a stucco exterior and a fire-resistant roof of asphalt shingles. They arrived in the late 70s and quickly put down roots, eventually raising their two sons, Willem and Shawn, here.
“When we first came here, that whole hillside was trees and shrubs… all wild stuff,” says Betts-van Hamburg.
Initially, they lived in a tent, then a cabin, while they cleared the land, felled and milled timbers, hauled rocks for the garden, and built their home from the ground up.
The house is tucked in the forest on eight hectares. A second building nearby contains an office and workshop.
The garden is lush and full of colour: black-eyed susans, dahlias, lobelia, and Japanese anemones, framed by tall grasses. It all slopes towards the lake in a cascade of green and red, yellow and blue. There are three small ponds, one of them full of goldfish. It’s one more source of water in the event of a fire. The whole scene wouldn’t look out of place in North Vancouver.
“This is, I think, kind of a British cottage effect,” Betts says.
But this is the Kootenays, and in the heat of summer, the threat of wildfire is never far away. There have been half a dozen outbreaks in the area in the past 10 years, including a small fire in May of undetermined cause along a hydro line within walking distance of their home.
The property “doesn’t have to be denuded” to be fire safe, Betts says. His home is surrounded by fire-resistant hardwoods such as beech and oak along with the fir and cedar, and the cedar has been limbed and trimmed to reduce the fire threat.
“So, your ladder fuels are gone.”
The garden and the surrounding lawn and trees look fresh, even in mid-summer.
“It’s better to have a flower garden that’s well watered than natural shrubs and needle trees, because it’s also kind of protection in case fire comes from the highway up,” Betts-van Hamburg says.
Neighbours look out for each other
She and John have gone far beyond the basic requirements of Fire Smart BC. They’ve bought structural sprinklers, pumps, and fire hoses, even a couple of portable reservoirs. There’s one that looks like a children’s backyard pool but filled to the brim with 1000 gallons of water. Then there’s a second, inflatable pool – orange and round like a pumpkin – that can hold up to 3000 gallons. It’s deflated now, but ready to go.
Betts and his neighbours have taken the basic S100 firefighting course, so they can spring into action when fire poses a threat. His plans show a system of firehoses extended down to the lakeshore, 300 metres away. One of his industrial strength pumps can draw water up from the lake to the relay tank – the 3000-gallon pumpkin – on the bench of his property. From there, a second pump would charge all the sprinklers on the buildings, 15 to 20 of them, joined in a closed loop.
“Within an hour or two, we could have our systems up and running… This whole place would be set up ready for deploying the pumps to the lake, and, depending on the level of emergency or how the thing progresses… we’ll be able to support our neighbours in a fire.”
Betts spent $25,000 just to install the fire-resistant roof. Add on the sprinklers, pumps and hoses, and all the remediation work on the land, and the bill is close to $60,000. He never applied for any money from FireSmart BC, but he did get a one-time grant of $10,000 from the insurance industry.
He’s still at work fireproofing; the job never ends.
“Now, why am I doing that?” Betts says. “Well, this is my home, and I’m fairly attached to it, and I’d hate to lose it to a fire.”
‘Our house is pretty vulnerable’
Fireproof wasn’t always foremost in Betts’ mind.
“Ten or 15 years ago, I became vaguely aware of the risk associated with wildfire. Like most people I hadn’t ever been thinking about that.”
Then he started following the science and speaking with wildfire ecologists.
“I realized, God, our house is pretty vulnerable. I was among the earlier generation of people who began to adopt fire smart practices as best we could, considering the hazard that our homes were starting to look like fuel.”
Betts knows that, in the event of a fire, his home, being a little of the beaten track, up a series of switchbacks from the lakeshore, might not be the first one the firefighters try to save. “There’ll be kind of a triage that takes place – where can they most efficiently and effectively mobilize their equipment. They’re not going to be thinking about me at the end of my lane.”
So, he wants to be ready.
Many others are not.
Fuel build-up in BC forests was flagged in 2003
Back in 2003, after wildfire devastated communities in the B.C. interior, the provincial government hired former Manitoba premier Gary Filmon to lead a commission of inquiry. Filmon’s report, Firestorm 2003, was blunt: “It is clear that a successful record of fire suppression has led to a fuel buildup in the forests of British Columbia. The fuel buildup means that there will be more significant and severe wildfires, and there will be more interface fires, unless action is taken.”
Filmon recommended the B.C. government and communities reduce the fuel load through prescribed burning, thinning, and spacing, in what’s known as the interface, where the town meets the forest.
From the start, progress was “disappointingly slow,” as noted in a follow-up report in 2018 by former cabinet minister George Abbott and First Nations chief Maureen Chapman. They found that less than 10 per cent of the B.C. landscape designated as moderate to high risk had been treated. The cost of treating the remaining high-risk areas was estimated at a staggering $6.7 billion dollars total, at an average of about $5,000 a hectare.
Abbott and Chapman said they heard a common refrain from local governments: “Most, if not all, taxpayer dollars are committed to building and maintaining water, sewer, roads, streetlights, parks and recreation and solid waste infrastructure. How can we justify spending local tax dollars on treatment of adjacent provincial Crown lands as we struggle to maintain that infrastructure?”
Few questioned that the work of fireproofing is vital; it’s just a case of who takes the lead, who pays the bills, how much they’re prepared to spend, and where the work is needed most, to get the best results.
While that conversation continues, B.C. has experienced its four worst fire seasons on record in the past decade.
Fire remediation needs new funding model, says expert
Wildfire ecologist Robert Gray of Chilliwack was one of the authors of the landmark 2003 Filmon Commission report. Since then, in media commentary and scientific papers, he’s been a constant critic of the slow pace of remediation. He thinks B.C. needs a new model to fund the work, rather than, in his view, downloading responsibilities onto local governments, and trying to get every homeowner to remediate their properties.
Gray was also co-author of a study published this month in the U.S. journal Science, which says B.C. and other jurisdictions need to spend much more on remediation now to prevent catastrophic wildfires later.
“Nearly all governments have left the crossroads heading in the same wrong direction by continuing to make massive expenditures in response and recovery and only minimal investments in mitigation and prevention,” the study says.
In an interview with Northern Beat, Gray argues programs such as FireSmart attempt to change human behaviour, which is “fraught with difficulty.” Rather, the government needs to change fire behaviour by cleaning up its own act and treating Crown land to reduce the fuel load and fire risk, he says.
A burn boss as well as a wildfire ecologist, Gray has overseen prescribed burns around Kimberley. The thinning and ground-level burning doesn’t leave behind a blackened, barren environment. Parks and cleared areas, roads and trails can also serve as buffers and fire breaks.
He says the B.C. government also needs to work with the insurance industry to offer incentives and assistance to property owners: “more carrot, less stick.”
Participation in FireSmart is entirely voluntary. But as soon as the work starts, the bills pile up. “Willingness to pay and ability to pay are two really big issues, and you can push FireSmart, and push it and push it, but you can’t get blood out of a rock.”
The median age in rural Canada tends to be older, and the average income lower than in cities, notes Gray. Many seniors can’t afford the costs of fireproofing. “Friends of ours in the south Okanagan, they changed the siding and the roof, and it was $130,000.”
Some insurance companies, such as BCAA and Co-operators, have partnered with FireSmart to offer incentives to homeowners who remediate their properties. BCAA, for instance, offers policy holders a $100 discount on their home insurance if they complete a risk assessment, and an additional five per cent saving annually if they do the remedial work.
Of course, policy holders can always approach their insurers and point out what they’ve done to upgrade their properties, but they may be reluctant to do so, if they fear it may, in fact, result in more work or higher premiums.
John Paolozzi, a communications officer with B.C.’s Ministry of Forests and the BC Wildfire Service in Nelson, says this can be a complex process. “I think people are afraid of attracting attention to themselves. And I think that’s the same even with an assessment. I think it’s not unlike going to the doctor… you’re afraid of getting any kind of diagnosis, because you might not want to hear what the news is.”
Dan Seguin, the manager of community sustainability at the Regional District of Central Kootenay, encounters the same problem.
“There’s a reluctance for people to get fire smart assessment on their house because they think it’s going to impact their insurance, they think it’s going to impact their property tax, or they think that the government is going to come to say, or the insurer is going to say, you have to take these actions. And that’s not true.”
Home remediation should be mandatory, says FireSmart rep
Programs such as FireSmart attempt to change the way we look at the landscape. Those rich forests that look so good in photos may be full of deadwood, logging slash, flammable shrubs, and fine fuels, such as twigs and needles, that become a menace in fire season.
Paolozzi says a big part of the job of Fire Smart is raising awareness. “It really depends on how much people want to do. They have to, first of all, recognize the risk in their particular community or their particular home, wherever they might be. And then they have to decide for themselves, ‘OK, what am I going to do? And how much am I willing to invest in terms of time or money?’”
But – and here’s the crux – FireSmart is also hoping local governments will step in and pass bylaws that make home remediation mandatory.
“Again, it’s 100 per cent voluntary at this point. So, in order to see real change, we’d like to see bylaws start to change with local governments, whether the municipalities, regional districts, or First Nations,” Paolozzi says.
Last year, FireSmart released a guidebook for its coordinators that lays out plans for local governments to regulate construction by designating Wildlife Development Permit Areas through their official plans. Local authorities would identify hazardous areas, and issue development permits that regulate everything from construction materials to the location of trees and hedges.
The insurance industry is supportive. In June, the Insurance Bureau of Canada welcomed a $104 million investment in FireSmart programs by the federal government, B.C. and other provinces and territories. Much of the money is for awareness, education and training.
The Insurance Bureau went one step farther, recommending governments at all levels update building codes to ensure “all new construction be designed with resilience in mind (i.e. mandate resilient roofing and siding materials),” and to prevent homes from being built in high-risk wildfire zones.
But in B.C., getting municipalities onside with mandatory measures is proving to be a challenge. As of last year, 48 of 189 local governments had implemented the Wildfire Development Permit Area plan.
Making fireproofing mandatory will get pushback
Any move from voluntary to mandatory measures is likely to get pushback from municipal governments and residents. Northern B.C., the Peace River region in particular, seems to be particularly infertile ground for FireSmart.
Former Fort St. John mayor and UBCM president Steve Thorlakson says conditions in the northeast are very different from those in the southern interior.
“The south has been built up, and built into the forest for much longer, and is historically considered a pretty arid place, so the risk of fire is highest. In the northeast, rural residences are isolated from the forest by the fact most of them are in farm areas…
“Yes, the fires in recent years in the northeast have been massive, but almost always have not threatened buildings or towns to any significant degree.”
Thorlakson says there’s also resistance in his region to programs that are imposed by the B.C. government.
“There’s a natural skepticism about policies being made in Victoria 800 air miles away from us.”
Fire suppression most effective at homeowner level
In the southeast, where many communities are carved out of the forest, the threat of wildfire is real, immediate, and simply part of the ecosystem, as John Betts says.
Surveys show more people are aware of the threat of wildfire. It’s not just the likelihood of a direct fire that worries homeowners, but also the ember storms that can spread in the wind for kilometers ahead of a wildfire front, sparking more outbreaks.
In the Kootenays, arborists can be seen thinning and pruning in every season.
One late summer day with smoke hanging in the mountains, Kiyo Elkuf of Loki Tree Service, is shirtless and sweating after a hard day of work clearing a property.
Lately, the arborist business is highly competitive, Elkuf says. “There’s growing demand. There’s just a lack of funds. It’s the sensible thing to be doing, as opposed the government investing 30 or 50 per cent more money for [fire] suppression… It’s much more economical to do the fire mitigation and provide work for the wildfire fighters.”
Elkuf says arborists, who know how to manage the landscape for fire prevention, are the best ones to do the job, rather than logging companies that want to harvest the best timber.
“Getting logging companies to go in there is kind of like the wolf guarding the henhouse.”
At the Regional District of Central Kootenay, Dan Seguin argues that fireproofing homes is a better investment than spending billions to treat the whole landscape, “although those have a place in the ecosystem of mitigation.”
Seguin, the manager of community sustainability, says the FireSmart program is becoming more popular every year; in 2024 FireSmart did 528 home assessments and gave out 115 grants in the RDCK. Twenty-seven neighbourhoods were recognized as FireSmart.
People can refit their houses for fire safety as part of a regular upgrade; for instance, to replace a leaky roof, as Seguin did. “If you’re in that asset replacement cycle, when that asset, or that part of your house, needs to be replaced, that’s a great point to make a decision to move to a FireSmart material.”
As someone who spent 10 years as a volunteer firefighter, he knows the lasting impact of losing a home. “Anyone who’s lost a home, it’s absolutely tragic, all the things we attach to and identify with, and the family history.”
‘It’s money well spent’
Family history certainly weighs on John Betts and Anneke Betts-van Hamburg as they ponder the question of what their home means to them. After nearly five decades and two now-adult children, they have developed deep roots in the land and the forest.
Betts doesn’t expect every rural homeowner to follow his lead and invest tens of thousands of dollars. But he thinks we, as a society, need to do more to prevent wildfires.
“I do not think, at the landscape level, we are investing in the measures we need to at a sufficient pace or in sufficient scope… It’s program versus project. We have a fragmented, project-based approach, which is doing little bits of good here and there, but the province needs to invest at a program level, and it needs to be linked to all of our other forestry management priorities.”
Until that happens, the Betts will continue to do what they can to save their home from fire, and to help their neighbours do the same.
It’s money well spent, he says: “What’s invested in it, in this property, is my heart, and I think that’s what most of us, as homeowners, would feel.”
“It just feels so good to be here, all the accomplishments we have done, and all the work we’ve done ourselves,” says Betts-van Hamburg. “It just really lifts your spirit up, and your heart up.”