What Canada can learn from LA’s wildfires

Los Angeles’ wildfires could “use up over 30% of the aggregate natural catastrophe budgets set by Europe’s largest reinsurers for 2025,” a new report from Fitch ratings suggests. And those fires, and their aftermath, contain lessons for Canada’s P&C insurance industry and community planners.

For example, wildfire risks are far less predictable than those of another common NatCat – floods. And that makes it hard to adhere to rigid ideas about where and where not to build or rebuild communities.

“Some say we should consider relocating people – or at the least, not constructing – in at-risk wildfire areas. But wildfire isn’t like flood. I can look at a flood map and pretty much tell what’s going to happen depending on how much water [the area in question gets] and what kind of time-period we’re looking at,” says Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

Canada’s flood patterns are fairly regular, he says. “We know about the return periods. We know where we’re vulnerable [and about] elevations,” he adds.

 

Different breed of Cat

But wildfire’s different. It’s erratic. The risk is transient, changing with the wind speed and direction, among other things.

“It’s very difficult to say, ‘We shouldn’t build here because of wildfire risk,’” McGillivray says. “I hear this all the time and I understand the sentiment behind it, [but] the reality is, it’s much more complex than that.

“The boreal forest is massive. And there are thousands of communities located within it. Are you going to tell me that we should get those communities out of the boreal? This is not realistic. And it’s not just the boreal that burns. We have grasslands. We have other stands of trees.”

Similar to California, communities built in forested regions are in proximity to an industry or employment centre that’s built around a resource fixed to one location. That makes it impractical to relocate entire populations, so the area gets rebuilt.

McGillivray tells CU that after the Slave Lake, Alta., fire in 2011 — which caused $1.97 billion of insured damage (in 2022 dollars) — a friend in the wildfire community commented, “there are tens of thousands of Slave Lakes across the country.”

To respond properly, urban planning can be means to reduce wildfire risk. (McGillivray notes that once a wildfire enters an urban area, it stops being a wildfire and begins a new life as an urban firestorm.)

Urban planning decisions made in LA over decades provide lessons in what to avoid. Houses are close together. Narrow roads don’t accommodate fire fighting equipment or evacuation, and fire can easily jump the narrow roads. And many homes are on steep slopes that fires can easily climb.

“To understand why [that’s bad], all you have to do is strike a wooden match and turn it upside down. You won’t be holding that match for very long,” McGillivray says.

 

Canada’s lessons

For Canadians, it might be tempting to shrug off wildfire worries in a city like Vancouver, which shares some planning elements with LA, because of that city’s heavy annual rainfall.

“Vancouver is wetter than LA, for example, but all you need is two [or] three days of low humidity, an ignition source and wind. You don’t need a prolonged heat wave. You don’t need months and months of no rain,” McGillivray says. “In May 2011, fire got into Slave Lake. There was snow on the ground the week before.”

Vancouver’s frequent rainfall also means that when fires burn, they have plenty of fuel, he adds.

That should spur planners to treat fires as a technical problem, since technical solutions have historically been used by cities like Chicago, Boston and Toronto to prevent repeat events. But people often view fire as a whim of nature.

“This is a technical challenge, and we can do this. We have to get structural building specialists involved in this, so we [can] get on with what we know works,” says McGillivray. He adds Canada needs a wildland-urban interface building code to ensure rebuilds meet fire threats.

“We know how to prevent structures from igniting. We just don’t do it,” he says. “You’re looking at a fire-resistant roof, fire-resistant cladding, and nothing around the house that can ignite. The federal government [via] Parks Canada has ordered that Jasper be reconstructed with those things in mind.”

Related: How to help clients mitigate wildfire damage

Fire-resistant shingling can be any material with a class-A rating, which could include metal, rubber, ceramic or asphalt shingles for example. For siding, cement fibreboard, stucco, brick and stone all resist fire. Vinyl and non-treated wood products should be avoided.

Insurance will also play a part.

“The theory behind insurance [is that] it’s not just a mechanism to provide indemnification, it’s a mechanism to motivate good risk-taking behavior,” McGillivray says.

 

Images by iStock: Feature image by Jessica Christian, inset image by Erick Ley