Is Vancouver at risk for urban wildfires like those that hit L.A.?​on March 25, 2025 at 4:13 pm

In the wake of the devastating wildfires that ripped through the Los Angeles area in January and as we get closer to our own peak wildfire season UBC’s Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability is hosting a timely talk with three wildfire and forest experts.

The West Coast Fire: Coexisting with Urban Wildfires in B.C. event is bringing together John Vaillant the 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist in general non-fiction with his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World and Koerner Chair for the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence and UBC Faculty of Forestry Professor Lori Daniels for a discussion moderated by UBC Faculty of Forestry professor Suzanne Simard the author of the game changing book Finding the Mother Tree.

The public event will be held on April 3 at 6 p.m. at Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability at UBC (2260 West Mall). Tickets are available at sustain.ubc.ca/events and there will be a free livestream.

“I will be sharing the stage with two of the continent’s leading forestry experts, Suzanne Simard and Lori Daniels,” said Vaillant in an email to Postmedia. “They understand B.C.’s and Vancouver’s vulnerability to fire better than just about anyone in the country.

More important, they understand B.C. forest systems, and how they are changing in ways that favour fire.

“This is crucial to Vancouver’s survival in a rapidly changing climate where heat domes can create fire weather conditions similar to those that burned Fort McMurray and L.A.,” added Vaillant.

Vaillant, a go to wildfire expert for media around the globe during the Los Angeles fires, says fires like those that destroyed Slave Lake (2011), Fort McMurray (2016) and Lytton (2021) “should have been wake-ups for Canadians,” long before the Los Angeles fires destroyed at least 11,000 homes and another 5,000 plus commercial buildings.

“(Vancouver) is very much at risk — a sitting duck, really,” said Vaillant whose Fire Weather is currently being made into a limited TV series by Vendôme Pictures. “Those two major condo fires (Dunbar and east Vancouver) last August, could have taken out large swaths of the city had the weather conditions been more fire-friendly (hot, dry, windy). We dodged a bullet and the VFD knows it.”

Vaillant is speaking of fires in early August 2024 at an abandoned three-story apartment building in east Vancouver and a six-storey Dunbar area development under construction. The latter caused a crane collapse, a gas explosion, downed power lines and damage to eight nearby homes.

As will likely come up in the UBC talk is the topic of risk assessment and what residents can do to help mitigate the chances of an urban wildfire.

“Besides decarbonizing ASAP, raising awareness about the possibility of urban fire in Vancouver, which is real and present, we all need to FireSmart our homes and neighbourhoods — a tall order in a city with so many old wooden houses,” said Vaillant.