The lightning-caused Juniper East fire in Kamloops on July 1, 2021.

The fire chief in Kamloops says crews need to be prepared for a “new threat” of more intense wildfires.

Chief Steve Robinson was giving a debrief to city council on Tuesday about the Canada Day wildfire in Juniper Ridge, and said the heat dome leading up to that showed the effects of climate change.

“Fire behaviour was different. There were things some of these wildfires did this year – rank five, rank six fire at night – that’s not the norm. We do have to take it seriously, and as a city and as a fire department, we are looking at what we can do to understand that new threat to us,” he says.

“Everything I’ve read says these events will be more common in the future. So we do have to take that into consideration, and look at ways that we can understand that new threat.”

During the heatdome, Robinson says Kamloops Fire Rescue started meeting twice per day on June 29 to prepare for a possible wildfire. Lo and behold, he says that preparation likely helped save homes, and potentially lives, when a fire broke out two days later in Juniper.

“We started to really think, ‘how are we going to manage an event?’ We really felt we were going to get something… We also conducted planning scenarios for a fire and we actually used that location as one of our planning scenarios.”

Robinson says KFR is also working to make sure messaging gets out sooner during a tactical evacuation.

Councillor Arjun Singh commended a live broadcast on Radio NL on July 1, saying it was a powerful tool to get information to residents and first responders when they needed it.