The municipality of Jasper and Parks Canada is taking firmer measures to protect the forest fire park, after a massive forest fire destroyed 30 percent of the place in the town in July 2024.
The measures will ensure that the houses are built with non -combustible ceilings and coatings instead of highly flammable material such as Cedro tiles, which had been a popular option for the mountain city.
The municipality adopted new urban design standards under its land use department and guidelines based on the National Firest program.
The program, developed in the early 2000s, describes how people can make their properties more resistant to fire, such as eliminating waste and dry vegetation and construction with non -flammable materials.
Mathew Conte, Jasper’s fire chief, said Cedar’s tiles, pine needles and pine cones are main fuels for the Ember showers who threw hot embers and fires on Jasper last summer.
“Where we discovered that we saw ourselves severely affected by that, many of the houses that still had cedar shock ceilings,” Conte said during a availability of news on Monday.
“The teams spent most of their night in action in those fires throughout the night,” Conte said. “Unfortunately, when they got one and went to the next, that Ember shower simply revived the structure behind us.”
Conte said the fire also clung to wooden roofs and juniper bushes in properties that did not implement Firmmart guidelines.
The municipality and the Parks of Canada are encouraging people who still have cedar roofs to replace them with non -combustible materials, such as tin and asphalt.
Conte said the Fire Department has hired a prevention captain to help educate residents about Firesmart guidelines, a program that has existed since the early 2000s.
With the help of the new captain, the Fire Department has carried out 30 advanced evaluations in the home in the last two months, he said.
“I think they are taking it much more seriously,” Conte said. “We have many residents who have really contacted us.”
Jasper has also bought residential sprinkle kits, which people can buy at the cost of the fire department.
Protection zone
Parks Canada has expanded its risk reduction program that began more than two decades ago, said David Argument, the resource conservation manager of the Jasper National Park.
The teams cut the highly flammable perennial leaf trees such as lodgepole pine in forest sections around the city site to be more difficult for fire to spread through a canopy of high trees, he said.
Until now, they have forged 900 hectares of land north and west of the city.
The thinning of the forest makes it more difficult for fire to spread through a high canopy of trees, he said.
In Pyramid Bench, a hill in the north of the city, the argument showed the media a new block of land of 60 hectares that cleared during the winter,
“We are trying to produce a fire protection zone or vegetation treatment throughout the perimeter of the community.”
You can walk from the southern end further from the city of Stone Mountain for about 2.5 km before reaching the end of the area, according to the argument.
“We are weaving a long -term plan that we believe can maintain in the long term,” argued. “We cannot simply cut it and get away. It has to be something we can maintain in the long term.”
It costs $ 15,000 per hectare to reduce and remove wood.
“Therefore, it is expensive work to get this wood from the landscape,” the argument said.
Conte said that the hot and dry conditions last summer were not preceded, and were surprised by the speed with which the fire reached the city, 46 hours from the moment the fire went on in the South Valley.
“From the moment the fire was about five kilometers, it took about 30 minutes to reach the city. Very little time.”
“We have always planned and prepared for a forest fire. And I think that any community that lives in a wooded area is always a matter of when it will happen, not if,” Conte said.
