Climate change predicted to transform Vancouver into San Diego, but at a heavy cost

[BaddieB]

The Los Angeles fires got me thinking there should be better fire-prevention infrastructure on the Mountains around Vancouver to prevent a fire from spreading into the city. West Van, North Van, Coquitlam, and Maple Ridge are all at risk, considering how dry summers are getting here. Maybe there should be an irrigation system throughout the forest than can activate in the dry season, sourced from the fresh-water reservoirs around the mountains.

[homebucket]

Are power lines buried underground up there? That'll probably help a lot too.

[Migrant_Coconut]

Rain gardens and other passive water collection systems would help. A big part of SoCal’s problem is that they either have too much water or too little (and too little means fires).

[chowhou]

Originally Posted by BaddieB

The Los Angeles fires got me thinking there should be better fire-prevention infrastructure on the Mountains around Vancouver to prevent a fire from spreading into the city. West Van, North Van, Coquitlam, and Maple Ridge are all at risk, considering how dry summers are getting here. Maybe there should be an irrigation system throughout the forest than can activate in the dry season, sourced from the fresh-water reservoirs around the mountains.

None of that gets you very far when the forest floor gets littered with green debris. My understanding is that was a major issue in LA; They built up the hills but didn't entirely clear out the forests. As a result instead of the hills naturally burning away every few years they just let the green waste accumulate. Unfortunately after a very hot dry period this now means there was plenty of material to burn.

For the most part we don't live in the hills surrounded by green like the LA hills residents do and the DNV at least actively manages the forested areas next to homes and the powerlines.

https://www.dnv.org/community-enviro...on-fuels-fires

(Despite everything, we also still have way more consistent moisture than LA does. When was the last time you heard about a serious forest fire on the BC coast? It's always the interior.)

[BaddieB]

I think it's really a matter of time. Vancouver and the South Coast's summers are getting drier. Some summers can go months without rain in a very densely vegetated area, a recipe for bad fires.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by BaddieB

I think it's really a matter of time. Vancouver and the South Coast's summers are getting drier. Some summers can go months without rain in a very densely vegetated area, a recipe for bad fires.

The three main factors needed to get fires like those currently burning in LA; dry fuel, high winds, and a fire source. The areas currently burning saw unusually heavy rains last year - there were slides and localised flooding reported. That meant grasses, and shrubs put on an unusual amount of growth. There are relatively few trees in the area, except where there's irrigation (in the urbanized parts) but there are plenty of bushes. Since then there has been an intense and continuous drought for many months. The grasses have died back and dried out, and the bushes are dormant, and in some cases dead.

Combine any sort of spark with that fuel and 160km an hour wind gusts, thanks to the strongest Santa Ana winds in a decade, and multiple fires were highly likely, and once homes and trees caught fire the embers showered down on dry vegetation and buildings way ahead of where the fires had already taken hold.

We've seen examples in Canada that are similar in recent years - in Fort McMurray, in Lytton, and more recently in Jasper. Go back to 1886 and the descriptions of the fire that destroyed Vancouver are quite similar to those in California. New Westminster had a similar fire in 1898.

The risk of something similar happening again has been acknowledged in Vancouver for many years. The dedicated salt water fire fighting system in place in Downtown was an expensive, and so far unneeded response. The system could also be used to suppress a fire in Fairview too. But that sort of infrastructure hasn't been installed anywhere else, and it would be expensive.

It's easy to imagine a combination of a high fuel load (thousands of dead trees in Stanley Park, or on the north shore for example), an unusually dry spring and hot summer, and a day with high winds, and exactly the same sort of fire could happen almost anywhere in the Lower Mainland.

The warming climate makes this scenario more likely - it's creating the circumstances that are killing the trees and increasing the intensity of both droughts and storms.

[Migrant_Coconut]

That'll explain why they've got the fire department spraying the entire park every time there's a dry period.

[Changing City]

Originally Posted by Migrant_Coconut

That'll explain why they've got the fire department spraying the entire park every time there's a dry period.

Yes. But you can only do that when there's no water shortage. You could spray salt water - but you'd risk killing a lot more vegetation.