Steven Guilbeault says the implication that the federal government could have done more to fight the wildfire that ravaged Jasper, Alta. is “simply not true.”
Guilbeault, Parks Canada president Ron Hallman, and Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland addressed reporters Monday, defending their response to the fire as having “saved lives.”
“The simple fact is that sometimes there are no tools or resources capable of overcoming a wildfire of the magnitude that we faced this week, and as the mayor so eloquently said the other day, ‘We stand humbled in the presence of nature,’” said Hallman.
Parks Canada has managed Jasper National Park since it became an official national park in 1930. Guilbeault said Jasper is one of the best-equipped towns in Canada to deal with wildfires.
“To think that over all those decades, we would not have deployed all of the resources necessary to try and do everything that is humanly possible to protect a town from a forest fire is simply not true,” said Guilbeault.
Thirty percent of the town was claimed by the fire, officials said. All fires in the town have been extinguished. A staged re-entry is currently being planned, but no firm timeline exists.
Jasper has sprinkler systems installed in key areas and Parks Canada has been conducting interagency emergency simulations with the municipality for at least the past seven years, according to Hallman.
“The fact is that Parks Canada and our partners have done everything we reasonably could have done to reduce fire risk over many years and to be prepared for what may come,” he said.
He said Jasper was evacuated of its more than 20,000 visitors and residents within five hours, with no casualties.
Hallman said that the pine beetle infestation was a factor in the fire, but insisted Jasper has been doing prescribed burns since 1996, with 15 in the last decade over thousands of hectares.
However, short of bulldozing all of the forests, Hallman said Parks Canada does its best to implement preventative measures, such as removing vegetation.
True North previously reported that a former senior planner of Jasper National Park said the federal agency’s fire prevention staff were overconfident in their ability to battle wildfires, and their neglect turned the park into a powder keg.
Peter Scholz, who was hired by Parks Canada in 2008, estimated that by last summer, close to 40% of the national park’s trees were standing deadwood killed by pine beetle infestation.
Hallman said the fire travelled 15 feet a minute and was 300 metres high, 100 metres above the trees. He added that the fire was projecting burning pinecones up to a kilometre ahead of it.
“There is nothing any human on Earth or any piece of equipment could have done standing in front of that wall of fire that would have allowed them to stop it. It’s just not possible,” said Hallman.
Ireland defended the government’s response to the fire.
“I just want to join and reinforce his message for anyone who might see this as a failure. I reject that premise, as does Mr. Hallman. We anticipated with Parks Canada that something like this could happen. And so we fortified our community,” said Ireland, who thanked the firefighters from across the province for “allowing 70% of the town to be saved.”.
“I reject entirely any suggestion that there is a failure here. Everyone got out of town. Every resident, every visitor got out safely, and most of our town was spared.”