Fire Workshop Proposal and Meetings with Council (December 2006)

On December 11th, 2006 a delegation from the KNPS met with City Council to discuss our concerns about the Park logging plan and to get their support to push Tembec for improvements to the Plan. On December 12th, Council and our delegation met with Brian Dureski of Tembec to discuss these concerns. The Mayor and Councilors were very supportive of the Nature Park and asked Tembec to agree that no logging would occur until a Memorandum of Understanding was signed by all three parties. Notes from the two meetings can be

downloaded here and here. It was suggested by Bob Gray, that the City host a facilitated two-day workshop to use a computer simulation to model various fuel reduction treatments in the Park and adjacent areas and see how the risks could be reduced while maintaining as many Park values as possible. Council agreed to that suggestion and the workshop is being held on Jan 25th and 26th. Representatives from Tembec, the KNPS, the City, the Kimberley Nordic Club, the Ministry of Forests, the Ministry of Environment and Wildsight will all attend.

This is an example of the kind of map that Farsite produces. The red and white lines show the perimeter of a fire as it moves across the landscape. Each line represents 1/2 hour of fire progress.

The facilitator that has been hired by the City to run the workshop, Robin Gregory, has assured us that fire will only be one of the considerations to be discussed. All the values in the Park will be considered and a plan that balances fire risk reduction with biodiversity, recreation and aesthetic values is the goal. If you would like to learn more about how the fire analysis will occur you can download Bob Gray's summary of the process as an Acrobat .pdf file here. (Please note that this is a fairly big file (1 mb) and the pages are in reverse order.)