Wildfires can light quick, spread even faster, and take a lot of effort to get under control.
The majority of wildfires are naturally caused by lightning - about 60 percent in an average year. If it's natural, are there benefits to a lightning caused wildfire?
According to Fire Information Officer with the Kamloops Fire Centre, Nicole Bonnett, a large percentage of BC's ecosystems are fire dependent, "Fire is naturally occurring in a lot of ecosystems and it can do really good things for ecosystem health, plant regeneration, animal habitat. Sometimes you'll see that we leave those ones that are further out in the back country, we'll just let them burn, do their thing, and keep an eye on them."
Wildland Fire Ecologist Robert Gray says fire has been used by Indigenous peoples for years. "They knew exactly when to burn, how often to burn, and how hot to burn to encourage food plants, medicinal plants, engineering plants. To survive on this landscape you had to produce a lot of food and you produced a lot of it by using fire."
Despite the benefits, fires can be extremely destructive. Studies have found fires impact not only physical health from smoke and air quality, but also mental health from anxiety and staying inside.
Gray says wildfires also cause a lot of financial strain as evacuations are ordered, buildings are damaged, and suppression efforts are increased. "The US Commerce department a couple years ago did an exhaustive search and they pegged the annual economic burden of wildfires in the US at anywhere for $75 to $350 billion dollars a year."
Gray says fire suppression is only a piece of the cost, recovery after the fact is what makes the price tag so high. "If you have a heavily burned hillside above a community or reservoir it can get rained on five years later and the soils are so impacted that you have a massive erosion event that wipes out culverts or it takes out some houses or it impounds a water shed or takes out a road. The cost of repairing that is actually attributed to that fire."
Gray says the total cost of a fire is as much as 60 times more than that of suppression, and that financial struggle is felt from the top with government measures all the way down to the little people.
A senior project manager with First Onsite Jim Mandeville said, "Of the respondents to our survey, we found that 1 in 10 British Columbia businesses had been interrupted by wildfire in just the last five years. This is almost double the national average and very close to the national leader being Alberta."
There may be some benefits to wildfires in the province, but ultimately they can do more damage than good.