Kimberley secures funding to study wildfire risks to drinking water supply
The project will model how severe fires could affect water quality and flows in the city's watersheds over the coming decades.
KIMBERLEY · The City of Kimberley will spend $400,000 on a two-year study of how wildfires could impact its drinking water. The funding, sought since the 2018 Meachen Creek fire, was secured with $300,000 from the Columbia Basin Trust and $100,000 from the city. The research will focus on the Mark Creek and Matthew Creek watersheds, which supply the community's water. It aims to identify risks to water quality and availability and develop strategies to reduce them.
Mathieu Bourbonnais, an assistant professor at UBC Okanagan, said people often take clean water for granted. "You turn on the tap and you have drinking water, and we just kind of assume that's always going to be the case," he said. Bourbonnais, who is co-director of the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence, noted that wildfires are changing the environmental systems that provide water. His lab will work with the city and a fire ecologist to model fire behaviour in the watersheds.
The study will examine forest conditions, weather and climate projections up to 2060. Researchers will analyze how a major fire could alter water quality, streamflows and the timing of water entering reservoirs. Bourbonnais said severe fires can destroy soil and vegetation, leading to more erosion and sediment in streams. They can also change snow accumulation and melt patterns, affecting when water flows into reservoirs. Wildland fire ecologist Bob Gray, who has worked on Kimberley's fire mitigation for two decades, said this summer's Matthew Creek fire led to a citywide evacuation alert. He said that fire is not expected to greatly affect watershed hydrology because the most severe burns were small and high on slopes, with lighter burning near the river. The greater concern is a future, more severe blaze in a drinking-water watershed.
READ MORE: Canadian wildfires could cost over $2 trillion in climate damage by 2100, study finds
READ MORE: Indigenous leaders call for stronger partnerships, traditional knowledge in wildfire fight
The modelling will help pinpoint where forest thinning, harvesting or prescribed burning could lower wildfire risk. Gray said such measures must be carefully planned to avoid increasing erosion or peak water flows. "What we need to do with the harvesting is be very intentional with it," Gray said. Bourbonnais added that these mitigation tactics also affect hydrology and must be considered.
Bourbonnais said much provincial risk assessment has focused on current or past conditions, and the worst-case impacts on large watersheds are not fully understood. "So it's not planning for now, it's planning for that future," he said. The project's findings will guide local mitigation work and provide tools other communities can use. Bourbonnais concluded, "The risk of doing nothing is greater than the risk of us being proactive."
With files from CBC News