As B.C. fires threaten highways, communities fear their access routes will be choked off

A wildfire that has shuttered the only highway to several towns and First Nations on Vancouver Island for nearly two weeks has local leaders and disaster experts calling on B.C. to better safeguard essential infrastructure.

The mayor of Ucluelet, B.C. — one of several communities currently cut off from its only paved access road on western Vancouver Island because of a wildfire — said it's just the latest wake-up call to the risks of isolation in emergencies.

Highway 4 has been closed east of Port Alberni, B.C., since June 6 and is not expected to open until Saturday. 

"This section of highway has really brought to light how vulnerable we are as remote communities with one road in and one road out," Ucluelet Mayor Marilyn McEwen told CBC News in an interview.

"We do need an alternate way to get to the west coast."

But these Vancouver Island communities are not the only ones confronting the danger of losing access to land routes because of a wildfire. And as experts predict such fires will likely get bigger and burn longer because of climate change, even existing alternative routes could be at risk in the future.

Farther north in the province, the massive Donnie Creek fire is now burning only two kilometres from the Alaska Highway from Fort St. John to Fort Nelson and other parts of the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality.

"Right now, it's really just the Alaska Highway in and the Alaska Highway out," said Northern Rockies Mayor Rob Fraser in an interview last week on CBC's Daybreak North. "So if the Alaska Highway goes out, it has a big impact on our community."

In the case of the Highway 4 closure, the province quickly announced a detour over gravel forest service roads, parts of them privately owned. But Ucluelet's mayor wants B.C. to look again at a long-proposed alternative route, the Horne Lake Connector, which is far shorter than the temporary detour.

Provincial Transportation Minister Rob Fleming said last Tuesday that his ministry "will undoubtedly look at that again as we come out of this situation."

'You'll see these cutoff events as fires get bigger'

In Fort Nelson, there is a paved alternative route to the four-hour drive south to Fort St. John — but it's a 17-hour journey through the Northwest Territories and Alberta.

"You'll see these cut-off events as fires get bigger and bigger," said David Bristow, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Victoria. "So the chance of multiple routes simultaneously failing does go up."

Bristow is part of a new research project, Serving Rural & Remote Communities: Co-developing Place-Based Climate Resilient Solutions.

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The sole highway connecting communities on the west coast of Vancouver Island has been closed for over a week and isn't expected to reopen for another week. It has cut tourist-dependent communities off from their main source of income just as high season gets going. The only way through is via dusty and dangerous hours-long detour.

He said planners talk about "redundancies" when assessing the risks to rural and remote towns. The more redundancies, or alternative routes and methods of transport, the less likely that town is going to be stranded.

But just having a rail line like Fort Nelson's is not enough if the tracks go through the fire-affected area. And since railways sometimes run near highways, both could be taken out by disaster at once.

That's what happened in late 2021, when landslides and floods cut off roads and railways between B.C.'s Interior and coast for months.

"When we look at the probabilities of things, there's no doubt one additional redundancy does make a big difference from having none," Bristow said.

'We leave no stone unturned'

The province's minister of emergency management and climate readiness said such considerations are front of mind, both in dealing with the current wildfire season and in mitigating the harms of future ones.

"When we work with communities that are potentially stranded or cut off from other areas as the result of a natural disaster or wildfire, we work very, very closely with them to establish [alternative] supply chains," Bowinn Ma told reporters last Wednesday.

"It could involve using alternative detour routes … using rail lines, waterways and airways as well. We leave no stone unturned."

She pointed to the Union of B.C. Municipalities' Community Emergency Preparedness Fund, which includes helping members plan ahead for "disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation." The province has put nearly $370 million into the fund since 2017, roughly half of that in February.

But while ensuring a community doesn't get totally stranded is ideal, it may be unavoidable, warned Babak Tosarkani, an assistant engineering professor at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. 

Remote areas should not depend only on their roads, rails, docks or airstrips in the event of an emergency — but also a detailed emergency plan that includes a stockpile of essential supplies, including medicines, food, power and water, Tosarkani said.

Another expert on rural and remote disaster planning is Stephen Sheppard, director of UBC's Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning.

"I think every community does need to become more resilient towards both climate change and other kinds of natural disasters," said Sheppard. "We can expect more of these compounding impacts; it's that simple. 

"Power, water, food, supplies — all of the essentials are all going to be threatened some time or another. Better planning, deeper planning that engages communities is going to help a lot."

For Ucluelet's mayor, the risk of her community's potential isolation is not going away soon, even when the small wildfire that's caused so much impact has been extinguished.

"We're looking forward to being on the other side of this," McEwen said. "But climate change is here for a fact, and wildfires are definitely here."