Following intense pressure from local residents to do something about their community’s deteriorating drinking water, the mayor of the Okanagan community of Peachland has called on the provincial government for a “time out” on further logging of local watershed lands.

The request by Mayor Cindy Fortin was made in writing to Doug Donaldson, Minister of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development one month ago, and flagged the community’s ongoing concerns with logging impacts on drinking water quality.

The letter only recently become public.

For years, Trepanier and Peachland creeks, the two creeks that Peachland residents rely on for their water, have been contaminated by fine particles of dirt that can mask potentially deadly pathogens, making the water unsafe to drink.

Many community residents believe that accelerated logging of the forests in the community’s watersheds caused their drinking water to become unsafe. As detailed in a recent investigation by The Narwhal, Peachland’s water grew markedly worse in the last decade and reached its lowest point in 2017 and 2018 after a mudslide below a logging road blocked Peachland Creek.

As a result, the community is now spending an estimated $24 million on a new water treatment plant and related infrastructure that many hope will be up and running in about one year’s time. Until then, local residents, like their counterparts in numerous other communities in the Okanagan region, live with the prospect of frequent boil water advisories.

Peachland’s main water supply comes from Peachland creek, its muddy waters seen here flowing into Okanagan Lake. Photo: Will Koop / The Narwhal

Mayor changes stance

Until recently, Fortin was reluctant to speak out forcefully on the issue, saying that a logging moratorium was too “lofty” a goal.

But recent presentations to council appear to have swayed her thinking. On June 26, she wrote to Donaldson asking that he halt the issuance of any new logging permits in the forested valleys that drain toward the community’s water intakes “so that the cumulative impacts on water quality, quantity and flow can be thoroughly examined.”

“This is huge. This is a big step,” said Taryn Skalbania, one of the community’s most vocal advocates for watershed protection and co-chair of the Peachland Water Protection Alliance. While Skalbania said the mayor’s letter falls short of what is needed, it is an important first step and may serve to motivate others in smaller rural communities like Glade and Grand Forks, which have also been the focus of investigations by The Narwhal, and where tensions run high over existing or proposed logging of watershed lands.

Taryn Skalbania stands in front of the Deep Creek Water Treatment Plant on McDougald Road in Peachland. A landslide occurred five mins off of McDougald Road and disrupted Peachland Creek, the town’s primary water supply. Photo: Travis Oleniak / The Narwhal

In response to calls from The Narwhal, Fortin said she understands the forest industry is important to the economy of the province, but that it has come at a steep price for her community.

“There’s been a lot of it. It almost seems like an increase in logging over the years,” Fortin said. “We’re not against forestry. We understand the economy of it and why it’s important, especially to the entire province. But it’s just that so much is happening up there that we’re really concerned that the cumulative effects are going to impair and affect our water. And we just can’t let that happen.”

A costly bind for small communities

Keith Fielding, a former mayor of Peachland and a current councillor, said the community is not alone in finding itself in a terrible bind when it comes to watershed lands.

In almost all cases, those lands are Crown or publicly owned and fall under the provincial government’s jurisdiction, not nearby communities. Communities have little or no say on the pace or kind of logging, yet are on the hook to pay for upgraded water treatment facilities in the event that logging or other land uses such as mining or cattle grazing degrade their water supplies.

“That is a problem. Especially for small communities that are faced with very large expenses for having appropriate drinking water. The standards are very high and are set by the health authority,” Fielding said. “And there is very little that smaller communities can do other than either look for government funding to build the necessary treatment plants or to plan for it (proactively building such plants) for a long period of time.”

Fielding, who worked for the City of Toronto until retiring and moving west 20 years ago, said Peachland always intended to build a water treatment plant. But the steady deterioration of the community’s water essentially forced the issue. Now, he says, the big problem is what happens if the water entering the new treatment plant continues to be muddy for months on end or gets even worse.

If watershed lands continue to be “denuded” by logging, he says, more water will run off logged lands faster, carrying more sediment with it.

“What we don’t want is for any problem to be exacerbated by additional, unwanted runoff,” Fielding said. “It just makes it worse, and it makes it more expensive for the water treatment plant to operate.”

Cumulative logging activities in Peachland’s watersheds have degraded the quality of drinking water. Map: Dave Leversee

Clean water No. 1 issue

Work done by the Peachland Water Protection Alliance and submitted to Peachland’s council prior to the damaging 2017 landslide noted that clean water ranked as the “number one issue for residents” and that nearly three in four of residents polled “wished for consistent, improved quality and quantity of water.”

In a June 27, 2017 request to Peachland’s council, the alliance noted that at that time the district faced spending $18.8 million “on the first phase” of a water system improvements that carried a combined price tag of $55 million.

“The district’s own website supports the Interior Health Authority’s recommendations that it is safer, cheaper and easier to protect water at its source, the watershed, than to treat it later at the plant intake,” read the request, signed by the alliance’s chairman, Joe Klein.

While Skalbania welcomed Fortin’s intervention, she said more specific things need to be demanded of Donaldson’s ministry.

She noted that in the current five-year planning period as many as 1,000 hectares more forest — the equivalent of two-and-a-half Stanley Parks — could be logged in Peachland’s watersheds. In addition, another 55 kilometres of logging roads could be built on watershed lands.

In a news release, the alliance said it “wholly supports” the mayor’s call for a pause in logging and said that current logging plans “will destroy much of what is left” of the community’s watershed lands.

“Already, more than 40 per cent of Peachland’s watershed is or ‘acts as a clearcut’ — meaning that past clearcuts have been replanted but that hydrologic recovery is only beginning,” the news release states.

Ray Travers, a retired professional forester and long-time provincial civil servant, is quoted in the release saying it’s time for the provincial government to act boldly and to consider special zoning of community watershed lands “to protect water and non-timber resources, similar to zoning already used in urban areas such as ALR (the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve) for farmland.”

The Narwhal filed several questions with Donaldson’s ministry.

Jeremy Uppenborn, a senior public affairs and media relations officer with the ministry, said the ministry had not yet received Fortin’s letter.

In an email, Uppenborn said that logging will likely continue on watershed lands.

“The province doesn’t plan to suspend harvesting approvals where proposed developments are consistent with legislative requirements, higher level land-use plans and professional assessment recommendations,” Uppenborn wrote.

Asked how the ministry plans to address cumulative impacts, Uppenborn said that a “hydrological assessment” of Peachland’s watersheds was carried out for the ministry by a “professional engineer” and that that report indicated “proposed” logging developments “were not considered to carry any major risk to water quality.”

Three companies currently have logging rights in the watershed, including Tolko, Gormon Bros. and the Westbank First Nation-owned company Ntityix Resources. Blocks of forest are also auctioned for logging in Peachland’s watershed under the auspices of BC Timber Sales, a provincial agency.

This article was produced in partnership with the Small Change Fund.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Richard Smith calls Peachland home. He has since 1947, the year he arrived in British Columbia’s Okanagan region as a four-year-old boy with his parents from Alberta’s oil fields.

As a young man working at a local sawmill to save money for his university tuition, Smith was impressed by the quality of the water that flowed out of the forested valleys behind the community and emptied into Okanagan Lake. 

“The water was spotlessly clean,” Smith says wistfully. “Oh, yeah, it was perfect.”

But during the past decade, the retired teacher says, his town’s water has turned perfectly awful. It is often murky and unsafe to drink for months on end.

Now, in a big expense for a small town, more than $24 million is to be spent on a new water-treatment plant to treat the water from Peachland Creek, the town’s primary water supply. The hefty price tag is already $5 million more than originally budgeted and will likely climb higher when a connection is made to carry water to the plant from the town’s backup water supply, Trepanier Creek.

Upon completion, the plant’s filters will, hopefully, screen out the fine sediments that have triggered numerous warnings from public health officials. The water will then be disinfected with chlorine and ultraviolet light to kill pathogens, such as Cryptosporidium, that have caused waterborne-disease outbreaks in the Okanagan and elsewhere.

A 2017 landslide downslope of a logging road, which temporarily blocked Peachland Creek, was an emphatic reminder to the town’s mayor and her fellow councillors that they must act. The slide caused the water’s turbidity, or cloudiness level, to jump far above the threshold that typically triggers boil-water orders.

Sadly, all of this was avoidable, Smith and others say. The forests behind Peachland have been extensively logged, the land mined, cattle-grazed and crisscrossed with roads. Clear-cut logging, in particular, has accelerated in recent years, with potentially serious downstream consequences.

Multiple use to multiple abuse

Public-health officials agree that the best way to get water that is the stuff of Smith’s memories is to use a “multi-barrier” approach.

Think of each barrier as a link in a chain.

The first barrier is the land itself — specifically, community watersheds or the lands draining toward a town’s water source. If those lands are kept relatively pristine, the water flowing from melting snow packs and rainfall is naturally filtered and less likely to be contaminated.

The other two barriers are water-treatment plants and the pipes that distribute that water. Take care of barrier one and barriers two and three are easier to maintain.

Peachland’s main water supply comes from Peachland creek. Its muddy waters are seen here flowing into Okanagan Lake. Photo: Will Koop / The Narwhal

The City of New York famously places a premium on barrier one. Its more than nine million residents draw their drinking water from a watershed with three protected lakes and 19 reservoirs. By protecting the lands around those waters, the city continues to operate the largest unfiltered drinking-water system in the United States.

But in numerous community watersheds in B.C., the situation is vastly different. Logging and mining put communities like Peachland and resource industries on a collision course. Multiple use of watersheds is resulting in multiple abuse of water resources, with the communities in harm’s way left to foot the bill.

Fires in a temperate rainforest?

Will Koop is a Vancouver resident who became active in environmental issues in the 1980s, when the forests surrounding the city’s primary drinking-water reservoirs were being logged.

The stated reason for logging was to clear away “decadent” trees that some foresters claimed posed fire risks.

Fire risks in a temperate rainforest? Koop was baffled. He began surreptitiously hiking through the watersheds. The more he saw, the more he believed the trees consistently targeted for logging were the oldest, biggest, and solidest. Dollars drove the logging — not a desire to protect water quality.

The light that Koop and others shone on that logging eventually forced the Greater Vancouver Water District to halt the practice in 1999 — something that the district could do because it had a 999-year lease to the Crown lands surrounding its water reservoirs, a level of control that is the envy of municipal governments across B.C.

Today, an area the size of 150 Stanley Parks is protected, and local governments link the “ecological health ” of their watersheds to clean drinking water.

The birth and death of reserves

After the Vancouver campaign, Koop began to wonder why so much logging was occurring in other community watersheds.

“Community watersheds comprise only 1.5 per cent of the land base,” Koop says. “Yet there is such a frenzy for getting into these places.What’s this all about?”

Koop’s archival research revealed that as far back as 1888, provincial authorities had powers to designate certain areas of public or Crown land as “reserves” that would be “set apart” for special uses such as protecting water.

In old provincial Forest Service files, Koop found maps from the early 1930s identifying the two watersheds supplying Peachland with its water — the Peachland Creek and Trepanier watersheds — as protected reserves. The words “No Timber Sales” were prominently stamped on both maps.

By the early 1970s, almost 300 watershed reserves were formally designated in B.C. and the Ministry of Environment was in charge of the reserves or community watersheds. Logging was supposedly ruled out on all such lands, with only minor exceptions allowed in cases where watersheds had not officially been designated as community water supplies.

But Koop found that despite such protections, logging did occur in many watersheds, including steadily increasing logging upstream of Peachland. The Ministry of Forests had effectively taken over control of community watershed lands. They were there to be logged, and in many cases they were.

Cumulative logging activities in Peachland’s watersheds have degraded the quality of drinking water. Map: Dave Leversee

A weary watershed on World Water Day

Taryn Skalbania moved to Peachland in 1991 from the West Coast, where she was used to high-quality water and communities that took watershed protection seriously.

When Skalbania first arrived, she found Peachland’s water fine, if somewhat unremarkable.

But by the early 2000s, there were days when the water was noticeably murky. By 2012, the water coming out of her taps stayed that way for weeks on end. Then the time span shifted again — this time to months.

That grim reality, among others, prompted Skalbania to become co-chair of the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance, a co-spokeswoman for the BC Coalition for Forestry Reform and a steadfast critic of land-use decisions in her community’s watersheds.

Taryn Skalbania stands in front of the Deep Creek Water Treatment Plant on McDougald Road in Peachland. Photo: Travis Oleniak / The Narwhal

In all of the years of boil-water advisories, 2017 stands out. That year, flooding occurred in many communities bordering Okanagan Lake. High runoff in Peachland’s watersheds also triggered devastating landslides that sullied the town’s water for months on end.

“Dirty water, historically, for freshet for two weeks is one thing,” Skalbania told The Narwhal. “But mudslides that disable the entire town’s water is another.”

The severity of events that year convinced many that clear-cut logging was at least partly responsible for what had unfolded.

“They contribute to how the water comes off of the mountain. They contribute to flooding. They contribute to the degradation of our water,” Chris Eneas, a Penticton Indian Band elder, said of the clear-cuts, which he saw firsthand during a field trip to the watershed in late March during World Water Day.

Many of the clear-cuts were at high elevations, where heavy snowpacks accumulated due to the lack of trees — precisely the same conditions that residents in the southern British Columbia community of Grand Forks believe contributed to the severe floods that beset their community last year.

In Peachland’s case, all the added water helped to trigger mudslides in 2017 that damaged the drinking-water intakes in the two watersheds supplying the community. Repairing the intakes cost more than $260,000, a drop in the bucket compared to the hefty $24-million-plus water-treatment project now underway.

But Skalbania notes that even the best water-treatment facilities cannot cope with water that is too dirty. Underscoring that point, every single water system in the Okanagan had at least one boil-water advisory in 2017, she notes.

If communities hope to keep such events to a minimum, there’s one sure way to do it, Skalbania says.

“Better source protection. It’s a no-brainer. Just ask Vancouver, Victoria, Portland, Seattle, New York.”

All the cities Skalbania mentions have protected water sources.

What’s bad for the bears

Brian Horejsi is another transplant to the Okanagan region. After living and working for years in the Calgary area, he now calls Penticton home.

An expert in large-mammal behaviour, Horejsi was contracted by the Valhalla Wilderness Society to study grizzly bears in the Granby wilderness near Grand Forks. What he found was a watershed so pockmarked by roads and clear-cuts that it had become unsuitable habitat for an iconic wildlife species that defines wilderness in the province.

What baffles Horejsi is that those same activities occur regularly in community watersheds, even though such lands represent a tiny fraction of B.C.’s land base.

“I don’t think there’s any question they should be protected.” Horejsi says. “One-and-a-half percent is inconsequential when you look at the big picture. And the big picture is that those lands are of huge importance for the vast majority of people living in the province.”

“I don’t think there’s any question they should be protected.”

In 2014, B.C.’s independent Forest Practices Board released an investigation of forest practices in community watersheds. The board found that between 2006 and 2014, logging occurred in 131 community watersheds. But some community watersheds were hit far harder than others. Fully half of everything logged in those 131 cases occurred in just 10 watersheds. One of those unlucky 10 did not surprise Skalbania. It was the Trepanier.

The board found that the accelerated logging was a result of the provincial government encouraging companies to aggressively clear away forests that had been attacked by mountain pine beetles.

Skalbania called that finding particularly troubling. In the name of responding to one alleged disaster, the government and industry created another.

“They always have what they call these disasters. ‘Hey, you’ve got a disaster in your back yard and we’ve got to come and clean it up,’ ” Skalbania says. “But they’ve ruined my water.”

Tanya Skalbania at the site of a landslide that polluted Peachland’s drinking water source from Peachland Creek. Photo: Travis Oleniak / The Narwhal

The Forest Practices Board found disturbing evidence that logging companies did not adequately consider what impact their cumulative actions would have on water resources. The board noted that the companies often relied on accredited professionals to address water concerns — yet of 31 professional assessments studied by the board, not one “fully evaluated” the “cumulative hydrological effects” of logging operations in community watersheds.

One year later, B.C.’s auditor general released an audit of the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations’ efforts to manage cumulative impacts. The audit concluded that the government did not give the ministry “clear direction or the powers necessary to manage cumulative effects when deciding on natural resource use”. The audit also found that the government did not give the ministry “explicit” direction on how “to manage cumulative effects when authorizing the use of natural resources”.

Putting First Nations in the hot seat

Like many First Nations, the Westbank First Nation watched for decades as the B.C. government turned over vast areas of forest to logging companies while failing to do the same for Indigenous peoples.

“A lot of our members had to go up north to find work,” says Dave Gill, a forester and general manager of Ntityix Resources, a Westbank First Nation-owned company.

After much effort, the Nation received a pilot licence in the mid 2000s that eventually became its own long-term community licence in 2009. That licence, combined with an anticipated woodland licence, means the nation has rights to log a combined 80,000 cubic metres of timber per year — enough to keep roughly 30 members employed.

But the lands the government granted Westbank First Nation forestry rights to lay within a number of community watersheds including the Bear Creek, Trepanier, Peachland, Rose Valley and Power’s Creek areas.

That decision meant that in addition to being logged by the First Nation-owned company, Peachland’s watersheds also faced impacts from logging and roads built by the two largest logging and milling companies in the region — Tolko and Gormon Bros. — as well as BC Timber Sales, essentially an arm of the provincial government that auctions tracts of forest to companies that then do the logging.

The road to water ruin

In its investigation, the Forest Practices Board flagged concerns with logging roads, in particular.

When water courses down roadsides and ditches, it transports large amounts of sediment. That muddied or “turbid” water increases the risk “that pathogens from wild and domestic animals (e.g. livestock) and human sources will attach to the fine sediment particles,” the board concluded.

“When water from the watershed reaches the intake, it must be treated so it is safe for human consumption. If the water is highly turbid, the treatment of water through ultraviolet light, chlorination, and/or filtration is less effective.”

Over the years, Skalbania has learned to appreciate better than most what that means. Water treatment does not guarantee water protection. If you fail to protect your watersheds, you increase the risk that water cannot be properly treated.

In March 2017, a slope below a logging road used by Gormon Bros. failed. It blocked the main creek supplying Peachland with its water. A new channel had to be dug for the stream so that the water could once again flow to the water plant. The slide and rechanneling of the creek meant months of bad water and boil-water orders.

In November of that year, local residents had had enough. They filed a complaint with the Forest Practices Board alleging that decades of logging and road-building had damaged their watershed.

Skalbania and others believe that the cumulative effect of all that logging degraded their water and that the simplest, most effective way to improve the situation is to halt the logging all together.

“If taking the tiny 400 square kilometres of our two Peachland watersheds from the entire provincial Allowable Annual Cut in order to protect the health of our ecosystems and in order to secure our water quality, quantity and timing of flow is not doable,” Skalbania says, “then the entire forestry management system in the province is flawed, fragile, a house of cards.”

The Narwhal contacted the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development to ask if B.C.’s chief forester has powers to lower logging rates also known as the “Allowable Annual Cut” in areas of the province to protect community water supplies.

In an emailed response, the ministry’s communications director Vivian Thomas said: “The chief forester cannot make land use or forest management practice changes where other decision makers have the statutory authority to do so.”

One of the most important “statutory authorities” is the Minister of Forests himself. Forests Minister Doug Donaldson can provide “explicit” direction to the chief forester and others on how to manage cumulative impacts.

Such explicit direction could have a big impact on how much more forest is logged in Peachland’s watersheds in the coming years, including logging that is under the provincial government’s direct control through BC Timber Sales.

In the next five years, Donaldson’s ministry says, 240 hectares of forest is slated to be logged in the Peachland watershed through BC Timber Sales timber auctions. That is six times more logging than has ever happened in the watershed under the auspices of such auctions.

In the meantime, the logging companies that historically did the lion’s share of logging in the watersheds have all approached Skalbania and others saying they want to log more as well. But with a twist. Rather than clear-cutting away all the trees, they now propose to selectively log some forests. The logging will allegedly protect the community from wildfires.

Clearcut activity in the Peachland area. Photo: Travis Oleniak / The Narwhal

Talk and log

Smith says selective logging is precisely what should have happened all along. As a young man working in the sawmill, Smith knew that the big fir logs running through the mill where he worked all originated from selectively logged forests. Ironically, there was nothing altruistic about the industry’s choice then or now.

Selective logging has been practised in the continent’s interior fir forests for a century. Such forests tend to be filled with fir trees of differing ages and heights. Selectively logging some of the bigger trees while leaving others behind to grow bigger is just a smart thing to do.

If the industry had stuck with that plan and not embarked on accelerated clear-cutting of the region’s pine forests as well, things may have been okay, Smith says.

Effectively, what the industry now says is that it will clear-cut fewer pine forests but rapidly increase the selective logging of fir trees. It’s a proposal that leaves Skalbania feeling cold.

“Tolko, Gormon and the Westbank First Nations have all come to us to say: ‘Hey, let’s sit down at the table. Let’s talk. We want to selectively log your watershed.’ Well, we’ve been asking for selective logging for years. Some of us have been asking for it for the last 30 years. And they weren’t interested. They told us many times to our face that it’s just not affordable.”

The year before the big slides that underscored the fragility of their community watersheds, Peachland’s mayor, Cindy Fortin, and her fellow councillors voted in favour of sending a resolution to the upcoming Union of BC Municipalities conference, the annual gathering of municipal-government leaders from across the province.

The resolution noted that “water is a public trust” and that protecting and controlling water resources “requires adequate tools to enable local authorities to enact measures for protection of watersheds”.

The resolution, which passed, called on the provincial Ministry of Environment to “expedite” giving local governments more powers to control events in their watersheds, including powers to issue logging approvals.

But if local residents thought that resolution signalled the council’s support for a halt to logging in the watersheds, they were mistaken.

On the recent World Water Day tour of the watersheds, Fortin told a local television station that a “moratorium” on logging was far too “lofty” a goal. “Collaboration” between logging companies was what was needed, she said.

In the meantime, the resolution passed by the Union of BC Municipalities is in limbo. According to a brief submitted to Peachland’s council in August 2017, the Ministry of Environment will not be acting on Peachland’s resolution any time soon.

“The ministry states its work will ‘take several years to accommodate the broad and balanced engagement with those who may be affected,’ ” the brief stated.

To Skalbania’s ears, that sounds an awful lot like a recipe for more talking and more logging.

“We cannot afford to wait two or three more years,” she says. “What will be left?”

This article was produced in partnership with the Small Change Fund.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

The Okanagan Valley is on fire.

Seven wildfires of note are currently burning along the Okanagan corridor, which straddles Okanagan Lake between Kelowna and Penticton, two of the valley’s largest urban centres.

Four of them are “out of control,” according to a spokesperson for the B.C. Wildfire Service. The fires were started after a towering lightning storm on July 17 sparked at least 38 wildfires across the province, including 14 along the Okanagan Corridor.

John Youngblut, Linda Youngblut, and Paul Henbury watch the Mount Eneas fire burn near their homes on Princeton Avenue, in Peachland, B.C. July 20, 2018. Photo: Jake Sherman.

A water bomber picks up water out of Okanagan Lake to battle the Goode Creeke wildfire burning in Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park. Photo: Jake Sherman.

2017 marked the worst fire season on record for B.C. Scientists say climate change means the province’s wildfire season is becoming longer and more explosive.

The largest of B.C.’s  fires right now is the Mount Eneas wildfire, which is burning across an area of about 18 square kilometres and is classified as out of control. It’s located four kilometres south of Peachland, a district municipality with about 5,500 residents.

Smoke billows from the site of the Mount Eneas wildfire as children play in the water on the shores of Okanagan Lake near Peachland, B.C., on July 20, 2018. Photo: Jake Sherman.

The second largest fire, covering about six square kilometres, is burning on the east side of Okanagan Lake — at the same site of the 2003 fire that threatened Kelowna, the valley’s largest urban centre. The 2003 fire forced the evacuation of more than 25,000 residents and burned more than 250 homes.

The memory of that wildfire is alive and well in the minds of the roughly 1,000 residents of Peachland who were evacuated or placed on alert in the past week. Don Lee is one of them.

On July 20, with the Goode Creek fire burning on the east side of Okanagan Lake across the water from Peachland, he was out fishing.

“When we evacuated in 2003, it was the same kind of storm as this one that set the whole thing off,” he said, taking a break from the pull of his rod. “The next day it had spread. But every year, it’s a problem. And it’s just starting.”

Don Lee ties a fishing hook onto his line on July 20 as the Goode Creeke wildfire burns near Peachland, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman.

Wayne Davis was out watching the Goode Creek blaze from a dock on the night of July 23.

Davis moved to the Okanagan Valley in 1977, and says until 20 years ago, it didn’t get this bad. Now it’s a constant problem, he says.

Wayne Davis takes in the Goode Creeke Wildfire from a dock in Peachland, B.C., on the evening of July 23. Photo: Jake Sherman.

That’s a sentiment that’s been backed up by members of the B.C. Wildfire Service, local government and fire rescue service, who are working together to battle the fires.

The Peachland Fire Rescue service has been out fighting the Mount Eneas fire, protecting the structures of its residents while the provincial fire service and the ministry of forests work to control and direct the blaze.

Some of the local Peachland firefighters who’ve been fighting the Mount Eneas fire are as young as 16, according to Peachland Fire Rescue Service assistant fire chief Tyler Hilland.

A member of the Peachland Fire Rescue Service debriefs after returning from fighting the Mount Eneas wildfire, burning just south of Peachland, B.C., on July 23. Photo: Jake Sherman.

Glen Burgess, the incident commander for the Okanagan complex of the B.C. Fire Service praised Hilland and the Peachland Fire Rescue Service at a press conference on July 24. He said the fire service is making progress on Mount Eneas and that they do not anticipate any further growth, despite the fact it is still classified as burning “out of control.”

“We’re extremely happy with the outcome. While the fire remains out of control we are not anticipating any further growth and we have a lot of resources on the scene,” Burgess said.

Glen Burgess, the incident commander for the Okanagan complex of the B.C. Wildfire Service stands next to a controlled burn on the hills above Peachland, B.C., on July 24. The burn was part of a demonstration of aerial ignition technology that was used to merge the Munro Lake and Mount Eneas wildfires, burning south of Peachland, B.C. Photo: Jake Sherman.

Though Burgess is confident, he acknowledged that high winds and more lightning in the forecast could reignite controlled fires still burning along the corridor.“Unfortunately it is still July and the fact of the matter is we have potentially a long hot summer ahead of us,” said Burgess speaking to reporters.

Hot temperatures and sun are forecast for the next week, and following the worst fire season on record, fire season in Interior B.C. is off to a sweltering start.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Part 2 of the series The Mine Next Door, an in-depth look at the proposed Ajax mine near Kamloops, British Columbia. Read Part 1 of this series: KGHM Open-Pit Mine Proposal Within Kamloops City Limits.

Despite concerns about public and environmental health, some Kamloops residents still support the KGHM Ajax open-pit mine proposal due to optimism about jobs and economic returns through federal and provincial taxes.

The perspective of the supporters isn't new. Resource exploration is common in the area. However, open-pit mines are a relatively recent development in B.C. According to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which is responsible for the Core Review of the project, "Throughout the [last] century following the Fraser River Gold Rush, most mining activities in British Columbia took place underground. But in the early 1960s, the feasibility of open-pit production increased tremendously, and as a result, several huge copper mines opened, including Highland Valley Copper—the largest open-pit operation in all of North America." 

However, many Kamloopians are hoping that the future of Kamloops will head in a different direction. Today the city is known for a great many things besides resources. Since Kamloops  is “Canada’s Tournament Capital,” a growing university town with the Thompson Rivers University, where the largest employer is the Royal Inlands Hospital (RIH), the economics of the Ajax project may not be as simple as they seem.

Most Kamloopians are comfortable with a certain amount of mining activity and resource exploration so long as it doesn't put priorities like health and livability in jeopardy. What makes the Ajax project problematic is it’s potential to threaten other industries, drive down property values and distort the healthy-city image that the title, “Canada’s Tournament Capital,” implies.

Kamloops has been picking up speed as a highly desirable place for young families and professionals to start a life and career. Business opportunities are plentiful and the RIH is actively recruiting medical and administrative professionals. Prospective Kamloopians could be dissuaded from re-locating to a mining town.

Surrounding the southwest side of the city with an open-pit mine and adjacent tailings facilities, could bring about the destructive re-branding of Kamloops from Canada's Tournament Capital to mining town. 

Part of the role of Tournament Capital includes hosting events such as the Western Canada Summer Games (WCSG). When Kamloops hosted this hugely profitable event, the City enjoyed an estimated $9,000,000 according to KAPA. The City hosts other large events such as the recent B.C, Senior Games and the upcoming curling Briar, all of which add large sums to the Kamloops economy. 

According to the economic development company Venture Kamloops, "Rocky Mountaineer Vacations injects over $15 million into the local economy during the summer season, and Kamloops is a stopover point for bus tour companies travelling between the Lower Mainland and Rocky Mountains. Kamloops also caters to the business travel market with state-of-the-art meeting and conference facilities. Several major hotel chains have moved to Kamloops in recent years, and the $20 million expansion of the Kamloops Airport is now complete." [view:in_this_series=block_1]

In all, tourism adds $165,000,000 annually to the local economy according the research of two faculty member in the tourism department of TRU. 

In a recent interview with DeSmog, KGHM, a Polish mining firm, said they did not believe the open-pit mine would affect the city's brand. “We do not anticipate the Kamloops Tournament Capital brand will be affected. Visiting athletes come for the city’s tremendous facilities.”

According to the Kamloops Area Preservation Association (KAPA) there is more at stake than there is to gain. “Homes in Aberdeen, Pineview Valley, South Sahali, Knutsford and in Mt. Dufferin [will be reduced by] 5% to 25% for a total of between $135,000,000 to $675,000,000 based on average current home values of $300,000. These residents will not be in the mood to spend much at local businesses after their assessment notices arrive.”

KGHM claims that the project will offer about 1000 temporary construction jobs during the building phase and “500 full-time positions ranging from technical, to mining services, health and safety, and administrative.” Former City Councilor, Chair of the Economic Development committee and member of the City Planning Commission, Dianne Kerr says, ”the [jobs]" represent less than 1% of the Kamloops workforce. Not all of those jobs will go to local residents. With the recent federal decisions enabling foreign workers to be hired at reduced wage rates, the number of jobs for local people will be even more questionable.”  

Since 2008, the market for copper hasn’t been as promising as it has been in years past and prices continue to fall. KGHM International—one of the largest copper mining companies in the world—has been making headlines lately for bad financial projections and financial losses due to the falling prices of silver and copper.

According to a recent write-up in Reuters, the company “disappointed on Wednesday (AUG 14, 2013) with a lower-than-expected net profit in the second quarter as it suffered from falling copper and silver prices.

The state-controlled miner showed a stand-alone bottom line almost 60 percent lower year-on-year at 666 million zlotys ($210.1 million). Analysts polled by Reuters expected the profit at 761 million. This pegs the company's first-half net profit at 1.73 billion zlotys, a little over a half of its full-year guidance of 3.2 billion.”

The AJAX mine project is a low-grade copper-gold deposit, which means there is not a great deal of copper, but there will be a lot of waste to manage. The combination of a low-grade mine and falling copper prices may imply that though the company may promise full-time employment for the 23-year life of the mine, the economics may not support it. 

The company predicts that the mine will have an “annual production of 109 million pounds of copper and 99,000 ounces of gold.” The facilities will have a 60,000 tone-per-day (TPD) processing capacity. When asked about the nature of a low-grade mine in terms of economics, the they assured DeSmog that "KGHMI has experience in successfully managing low grade deposits to meet financial goals in accordance with our Zero Harm philosophy."

KGHM expects to make a contribution of “$550 million dollars in Federal and Provincial taxes, $210 million in British Columbia Mining Act Tax, and $110 million in Municipal tax. Additionally, all levels of government are expected to benefit from increased indirect taxation associated with the project arising from income, property, and consumer taxation from business and employees working for, or servicing, the Ajax Project.”

The researchers at KAPA wonder if the company isn’t being somewhat misleading. According to their breakdown Ajax will "result in a total profit of over $9 billion dollars that will leave the Kamloops area, [going] mostly to Poland and some to Victoria to fund projects such as bridges, roads and stadium roofs in the golden triangle” and Kamloopians may be forced to subsidize the project by building roads and offering energy cost incentives.  

“This is not a good deal for Kamloops,” said Dianne Kerr. “The costs to our City are just too great, both in human and environmental terms. What is truly sad is that those costs will go un-quantified because the assessment process does not require a high level socio-economic study."

*image via Wikipedia and KAPA

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