With the dry season in full swing, and the threat of wildfires ever present, Lake Cowichan’s mayor is pleased the town's application for a $400,000 FireSmart grant from the Union of B.C. Municipalities has been successful.
Tim McGonigle said Lake Cowichan is closely surrounded by forests so the town initiated a FireSmart program a few years ago to mitigate the risk of wildfires to Lake Cowichan’s homes and residents, as well as its infrastructure.
He said the $400,000 in funding for the town’s Community Resiliency Project - Phase 1 from the UBCM’s 2024 FireSmart Community Funding program will be used, in part, to hire a person to oversee Lake Cowichan’s ongoing FireSmart program on a two-year contract.
“It has been determined that Lake Cowichan is in a fire-hazard zone that is surrounded by private forest-managed land, so any possibility of wildfires and the impacts that would have on our residents and infrastructure needs to be addressed,” McGonigle said.
“We have limited egress and access to many areas of town and that’s a concern. We also have just enough firefighting infrastructure to deal with two or three structure fires at a time, so any fires beyond that could be devastating to the community.”
McGonigle said the town has been undertaking remediation projects in its neighbourhoods for several years, largely funded through grants from the UBCM’s FireSmart program, and the plan is to expand the town’s program with the latest grant.
He said the person who will be hired to oversee the program will be responsible for doing assessments of properties in Lake Cowichan to determine what is necessary to make them better able to deal with wildfires.
“Combustable materials should be kept at least 1.5 metres away from homes and structures, and dead trees close to structures should be removed, and some trees will need to have limbs removed and shrubbery cleared away,” McGonigle said.
“We’ll also have a focus on protecting our parks, water-treatment facilities and other infrastructure from wildfires. We have had close calls in the past, including a wildfire at Lizard Lake a few years ago, and there was another adjacent to the town’s boundaries about 15 years ago and Mars water bombers had to be brought in to help extinguish it.”
McGonigle said the funding announcement is good news for the town at the beginning of what could be a long, hot and dry summer.
“We’re very lucky to have a continuing finding stream from the UBCM to continue our FireSmart program,” he said. “It also takes a lot of pressure off our volunteer fire chief who initially started the program.”
