When Scott Driver began work as fire chief in Cranbrook, B.C., in 2019, his mission was crystal clear: protect his town’s residents and buildings from fire. But it wasn’t until 2022, when a wildfire threatened the mountainside that collects his town’s drinking water, that he realized that in this warming climate, his responsibilities extend far beyond the city limits. 

The BC Wildfire Service was preparing to do everything it could to stop the rapidly growing flames of the Connell Ridge fire. There was just one problem, Driver says. That same slope it was about to raze, burn and dump retardants on was the main source of tap water for Cranbrook, supplying its 20,000 residents with drinking water. 

That’s when a light bulb switched on for him. “Not only do I have to protect the citizens in their houses and our infrastructure, but I have to protect the ability for them to stay in their house and drink water, cause it’s a piece of life,” he recalls thinking. 

He quickly brought his city’s water manager into the fire incident management team and BC Wildfire Service amended its action plan. This isn’t about houses, this is about drinking water, Driver remembers telling them.

The hotter a fire burns, the more the charred soil repels water long after the flames are extinguished. That leads to more sediment washing into streams, more harmful bacteria and warmer water — all of which make it harder and more expensive to treat drinking water. One study from the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found once one-fifth of a watershed’s footprint is burned in severe fire, it will experience increased runoff and water flows, which worsens water quality downstream as the healthy soils and vegetation that absorb and filter water are burned away. 

As climate change combines with decades of rapidly putting out most wildfires — leaving forests packed with dry fuel — the ripple effects are showing up in our tap water. Last summer, discoloured tap water flowing out of faucets in West Kelowna was likely caused by the wildfire that scorched the slopes feeding into the Rose Valley reservoir the previous summer, according to a city statement. 

An analysis by a team of environmental scientists published earlier this year examined 245 burned watersheds across the United States and found organic carbon and phosphorus remained elevated for five years post-fire, while nitrogen and sediment levels remained elevated for up to eight years. The scientists, from the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado, found nitrogen levels in the surface water from watersheds burned in the 2002 Hayman fire, the largest recorded in the state’s history at the time, were still elevated almost 15 years after the fires.In emergency planning, responders plan around safeguarding critical infrastructure assets, but Driver sees a dangerous blind spot in B.C. when it comes to what’s considered critical. “The natural asset of a watershed isn’t currently top of mind for most,” he says. “That’s as important as the schools and the hospital.”

Wildfires are a threat to water security

Fortunately this is still a theoretical concern for Driver, but in many parts of the province, it’s already an issue. Most cities and towns in B.C. depend on reservoirs which collect surface water — the water we can see that comes from rain, melting snow, rivers, lakes and streams. There are more than 466 community watersheds in the province that supply many British Columbians with their water. “You cannot have a community without water,” Robert Gray, a wildland fire ecologist based in Chilliwack, B.C., explains. “The reality is we’re going to be facing more and more of these kinds of crises where we’ve had a significant impact to the watershed.”

In 2023, Canada’s worst wildfire season by a long shot, a record 2.84 million hectares burned in B.C. alone, an area almost as large as all of Vancouver Island. Of that total, 13,970 hectares burned in the Grouse Complex Wildfire that included the McDougall Creek fire in West Kelowna.

Following concerted firefighting efforts, West Kelowna’s brand new $75-million Rose Valley water treatment plant was spared, but the forested watershed which feeds the water plant was not so lucky. About 95 per cent of that watershed burned, a significant change to the landscape which has worsened water quality in the reservoir, increasing turbidity and concentrations of manganese — an unwelcome legacy expected to persist for at least five years after the burn, if not longer.

“We know the land surrounding the Rose Valley reservoir has been damaged because of the wildfire in 2023, and it means the contaminated source of water can be harder to treat because of the sediment, nutrients, metals and organic matter as a result of burned material,” Interior Health medical health officer Dr. Fatemeh Sabet told West Kelowna city council in June this year. 

In 2009, one of the main watersheds that supplied water to Lillooet, B.C., burned extensively in the Mount McLean fire. As a result, its water was contaminated by ash and fire retardant and was unusable altogether. It forced the district to ban water for irrigation in the short term to stretch its reduced water capacity. Since then, the town has developed alternative water sources with the help of $10 million in federal funds. 

“The frequency and intensity of the fire seasons has been overwhelming for a lot of us,” J. Ivor Norlin tells The Narwhal. As head of the drinking water systems program at B.C.’s Interior Health Authority, he’s seen an increase in impacts on water systems due to wildfires. “If it happened once in a while we might be able to focus resources. Now it’s happening every other year, or every three years, and it’s just more and more and more,” he says. In cases like West Kelowna’s McDougall Creek fire, the connection between the fire that burned in August 2023 and the rusty-coloured water with elevated manganese levels that poured out of the tap the following summer was clear. For other water quality impacts, it’s harder to connect the dots. 

Norlin says water managers are seeing the water quality in the entire Okanagan area change in recent years — everything from an increase in water temperatures to spikes in phosphorus and fine sediment have been documented. While the region saw dramatic wildfires in 2017, 2021 and again in 2023, whether these changes in the lake’s water are due entirely to wildfire, or a confluence of extreme weather events, is hard to pin down. “It’s also just part of those broader climate change impacts and just our reality of a shifting environment,” he says. It’s not just B.C. seeing water impacts from wildfires. The fire that struck Fort McMurray, Alta., in 2016 left a huge burn scar on either side of the Athabasca River from which the town’s water is collected. “The water treatment plant there is still dealing with the effects of that fire now,” Juliette O’Keeffe, a senior scientist at the National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health explains. “Anyone that is operating a water treatment facility has to be aware that there is always a potential for risk of a wildfire.”“It’s not just the land that is burned; you can see downstream impacts as well. Water flows downhill.”

The path to fire-resilient watersheds — and the hurdles in the way

In the cases of West Kelowna and Fort McMurray, their plants have proven robust enough to ensure adequate water treatment despite challenges posed by downstream wildfire impacts, even if they have hiked up water treatment costs. But in Cranbrook, Driver is focused on mitigating the risks upstream, where he wants to make the land more fire-resilient in the first place. 

That way, when it catches fire, it won’t burn so hot and it can bounce back more readily. “We’re not going to stop fire from hitting the landscape,” Driver says. “What we need to do is stop it from wrecking the watershed. … What we want to do is be resilient enough that we can still drink the water after the fire’s been put out.”

He and his department have already begun work to increase the resilience of the city’s water catchment, doing landscape treatments across the parcel of Cranbrook-owned forest adjacent to the town’s water reservoir. They have removed fallen logs, thinned the forest and reduced the amount of fuel available to wildfire and have plans to do more. 

“We’re … planning to do logging and prescribed burning so that if a fire comes roaring down the mountain, it doesn’t come right up to the water’s edge and contaminate the reservoir of water that we use for drinking,” he explains. 

The interior Douglas fir forests surrounding Cranbrook are fire-adapted landscapes, able to recover readily from lower-temperature wildfires. Historic tree-ring analysis shows the forests in the area experienced fire every two to three decades over a period of about 250 years. Burning was a cultural practice of the Ktunaxa, who stewarded these lands for generations, using fire to renew the landscape, improve berry harvests and increase pasture. British Columbia banned cultural burns with the Bush Fire Act of 1874 – the first province in the country to do so. 

In spring 2023, members of ʔaq̓am, a Ktunaxa community, and crews from BC Wildfire Service and Cranbrook’s fire department conducted a 1,200-hectare prescribed burn. A little more than two months later, wildfires whipped through the area. Driver believes the cultural burn reduced fuel loads across the landscape significantly enough to redirect the uncontrolled wildfire away from assets like the airport and neighbouring communities. 

A growing body of scientific evidence shows pre-emptively burning landscapes in low-severity fires lowers their risk of experiencing high-severity fires later, including a recent study out of Stanford University which found prescribed burns lowered the severity of wildfires by 16 per cent and net smoke pollution by an average of 14 per cent. Another analysis found even greater gains of a 72 per cent reduction of severe wildfire risk if forests were thinned to reduce “ladder fuels” (vegetation that can catch fire, drawing flames from the ground up into the tree canopy) and small trees before prescribed burning. 

Driver and his fire department are empowered to reduce the flammability of the parcel of land around the town’s water reservoir because it’s city-owned. But when he looks uphill to the larger watershed that Cranbrook’s citizens rely on, he’s not sure there’s any path he can pursue to make that watershed fire-resistant, because it’s on Crown land. 

“What we need to do in the watersheds are fuel treatments … to mitigate or alleviate fire intensity and severity,” Gray says, adding that means thinning conifer stands, prescribed or cultural burning, converting conifer stands to hardwood or encouraging shrub fields. Most critically, it means asking the B.C. Ministry of Forests to pivot from its status quo model of timber management to more holistic ecosystem management practices that meet multiple objectives.

Currently, as both Gray and Driver note, the province will license a community to collect surface water from a watershed for its water, and with the other hand, permit a private company to harvest timber in that same watershed, with no provisions for the forestry company to log or manage that forest to mitigate its wildfire risk (whether its surface water is licensed to a community or not).

Historically, those two things — timber harvest and surface water collection — could happen in parallel without issue, but now that wildfires are threatening water security, and the best mitigation to safeguard that water source involves altering its management, the two are put in conflict. “Now your focus has to be reducing fire threat to the watershed and not just chasing timber,” says Gray. “The province should have this leadership role where they basically go to the [timber] licensee and say, the objective here in this piece is water quality and water quantity, and reduction of fire risk.” 

It’s possible for a forested watershed to be managed for both fire resilience and profitable harvests, protecting economic interests as well as water supply. In the U.S., Denver Water, the utility that provides the Denver area with clean water, spent tens of millions to repair infrastructure and remove sediment from its reservoirs in the aftermath of the 2002 Hayman Fire. It partnered with federal and state agencies in an initiative called “From Forests to Faucets” to restore fire resilience to the drainage basins that fed its reservoirs. Since 2010, the initiative has conducted treatments across 100,000 acres (roughly 40,000 hectares), ranging from planting within burned priority watersheds to fuel reduction treatments in unburned watersheds to reduce the risk of high-severity fires there.

But such an approach would require a shift in focus and new standards that the province has been unable or unwilling to negotiate for industry. “It takes an adult in the room to say, this is how we’re going to do it,” says Gray. “Right now we don’t have an adult in the room.” 

In an emailed statement, the B.C. Ministry of Forests referred The Narwhal to the newly updated “Silvicultural Systems Handbook for British Columbia” as an example of how the province is “advancing innovative silvicultural practices like selective thinning, fuel management and forest restoration” to advance its understanding “of how changes to forest, water and climate will influence sustainable resource management.” However this handbook provides guidance on best practices for practitioners, rather than enforceable regulations, and provides no specific guidance on how forests that collect surface water for communities downstream should be managed to reduce the risk from severe wildfire. 

The Ministry of Forests also pointed The Narwhal to its Forest Landscape Planning framework (its new forest management regime), which it writes gives “First Nations and non-Indigenous communities greater say in how forest management takes place in their community watersheds.”

And as Canada experiences its second-worst wildfire season on record, communities across B.C. are watching as their own watersheds are threatened and transformed by flames. 

When it comes to watershed management, Gray says, “If you hold to your current static plan, you’re already behind the eight ball.”

Updated Sept. 15, 2025, 11:35 a.m. PT: This article was updated to correct the year of a prescribed burn near Cranbrook, B.C. The burn took place in 2023.

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Last week, the eyes of the world were on Jasper, Alta., as a fast-moving wildfire swept through the Rocky Mountain community, razing historic buildings, homes and businesses. 

Firefighters on the ground reported meeting walls of flames 100 metres high. More than one-third of the Jasper townsite was destroyed, while approximately 325 square kilometres of the national park — close to three per cent — have been scorched to date. The townsite is now secure, but the out-of-control Jasper wildfire is still burning through forests in the iconic park.

As the Jasper disaster continues to unfold, many Canadians are pointing fingers, looking to blame a single source for what happened. Some say it was the mountain pine beetle, which killed off significant sections of forest, leaving dry, dead trees. Others say not enough was done to thin the forest and build an effective fire break near town. 

The reality, however, is more complicated.

Decades of highly effective fire suppression in and around national parks have left them more vulnerable to large fires, according to Pierre Martel, the director of national fire management for Parks Canada. 

Forests across Canada, and beyond, have been without fire for too long, setting the stage for uncontrollable mega-fires, with seemingly limitless fuel, in a drier and warmer climate.

And it’s not just parks that are primed to burn. 

In B.C., the town of Lytton burned to the ground in 2021 and has yet to be rebuilt. In 2017, a fire swept through Paradise, Calif., claiming 85 lives. That same year, another Rocky Mountain jewel in Alberta, Waterton Lakes National Park, was hit by a massive blaze. 

Research suggests logging leaves boreal forests more susceptible to fire from both lightning strikes and increased human activity in the woods. 

Without small-scale prescribed burns and brush removal to periodically clean the forest floor of natural detritus, parks and other places can quickly succumb to massive wildfires beyond our control. 

Add in climate change, with its increased heat and chaotic precipitation, as well as dead trees from mountain pine beetles — themselves a byproduct of warmer winters and past forest management — and the conditions are prime for a devastating firestorm.

Reversing decades of fire suppression in Jasper and other parks

Forest ecosystems in parks have unique histories and issues — and also unique opportunities for solutions that can help mitigate wildfires. 

Before colonization, Indigenous Peoples managed fire to clear the forests of fuel, promote the growth of traditional and medicinal plants and restore habitat for large mammals and other wildlife. 

In some ways, Martel and others say we’re playing catchup, trying to reverse the consequences of management practices of the recent past and mitigate climate impacts so as to reduce the risk of wildfires in protected areas and improve wildlife habitat. 

“Historically, and probably still today, there would have been more of a tendency towards overprotection of protected areas,” Wesley Bell, a conservation policy specialist with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, says in an interview. 

After all, parks are managed places. Fire suppression — which has changed the composition of the forests and altered the natural ebb and flow of wildfires — is one aspect of that management. 

Natural Resources Canada says multiple considerations are taken into account in deciding whether to let a fire burn or to fight it, with a focus on saving “high-value commercial forests,” residential areas and recreation sites. The federal department notes, “Protection of rare habitat, culturally significant areas and similar values will influence suppression decisions.”

But leaving things to nature, or undoing the management errors of the past, isn’t always possible, particularly in an increasingly fragmented landscape across vast areas of Alberta and B.C. Even activities like prescribed burning have to be carefully thought out. 

Bell points to caribou in Alberta, noting there isn’t much undisturbed habitat left and it’s difficult to justify burning it to manage the risk of wildfires because the caribou have nowhere else to go.

“I think one of the difficulties in the current landscape, with the amount of industrial disturbance through forestry and mining and everything, is that you can’t manage a protected area on its own. It needs to be within the broader landscape,” he says. “And that’s particularly challenging with the extent of the disturbance that there is in Canada, but in Alberta especially.”

Parks Canada takes similar factors into account when deciding how to confront a fire, according to Martel. 

“In the areas that are within a certain zone, that is tied to the highest risks to people and infrastructure and communities, … we have to continue the suppression history because we can’t afford to have fires freely burning on those landscapes; it’s just too risky,” he says.

There is also the tension between recreation, tourism and protection that is ubiquitous in popular parks — particularly in Jasper, which saw 2.48 million visitors in 2023 and Banff, which saw 4.28 million. The parks are there to be enjoyed, but that must be balanced with the mandate to prevent ecological harms. 

It’s one reason Bell’s organization advocates for expanding Canada’s network of protected areas — to provide more room for recreation and habitat protection as human populations swell and wild spaces become less wild. 

But it’s challenging to balance all those factors. 

Learning to prevent fires — by setting them

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist and researcher with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, says restoring balance on the landscape isn’t going to happen overnight. 

“The situations that we’ve seen in British Columbia and Alberta and throughout Canada in the last seven or so years have been the accumulation of many things that have gone wrong,” she says. 

According to BC Parks, 13 provincial parks were closed in early August due to wildfires, with another three partially closed. In Alberta, only one provincial park was closed as of Aug. 1, while 12 have been impacted by fires this year, according to data collected by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. They include Jasper and Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta.

Hoffman says many provinces are taking more proactive approaches, including supporting Indigenous-led fire stewardship and cultural burning, but more needs to be done at a larger scale. 

In many ways, Parks Canada is ahead of the curve when it comes to fire management in Canada, she adds.

“Parks Canada probably has the most advanced fire program out of anyone,” she says, including the use of prescribed burns. 

“They get a lot of pushback and I feel for them, because they’ve done so much. And they’ve done it on their own before the provinces really came into the picture.” 

Parks Canada says it initiated eight prescribed burns in six different areas in 2023, burning 5.3 square kilometres across Canada. That’s cumulatively less than one per cent of Jasper alone, by comparison, but the agency notes planning for those fires can take years, with consultations and peer review — and then waiting for the right weather conditions at the right time to move forward with a burn. 

Martel says prescribed burns focus on areas that can’t be allowed to burn out of control, including Jasper. He notes the personnel who light controlled fires are the same called on to fight wildfires.“These fire seasons are getting longer — they start earlier, they end later,” he says. “And so then it doesn’t leave us much for a window to make progress on prescribed fires.”

In the off-season, the agency focuses on building fire breaks and removing vegetation that could pose a greater fire risk. 

BC Parks has a program dedicated to fire management, focusing on wildfire planning, prevention and cultural and prescribed burns. The parks branch also conducts regular assessments of hazard trees and tailors approaches to each individual park, a spokesperson said in an email.  

A spokesperson for the Alberta government did not respond to questions by publication time. On Aug. 1, the government listed two prescribed burn projects on its website. 

Hoffman says, “letting fires burn under more moderate fire conditions” helps clear out fuel on the landscape. The challenge, she says, is that wildfires are happening under extreme conditions. Exacerbated by climate change, they can spread rapidly.

Deeply ingrained public perceptions need to shift, Hoffman says. A greater acceptance of prescribed burns as a tool to prevent fire and more education to overcome concerns about them is necessary, she adds.

Jasper and other areas managed with fire in the past

When settlers drew the lines on the map in 1907 to set Jasper’s park boundaries, they were attempting to box in the area’s iconic mountains, glaciers and forests — and keep out the First Nations and Métis peoples who had lived in the area for millennia. Efforts to preserve the awe-inspiring views didn’t take into account the landscape was always evolving and sometimes burned.

“One of the misconceptions is that those places should be free of fire,” Hoffman says. “The reason we create a lot of parks and protected areas is to save that kind of old-growth structure that we love in those places we like to spend time in. Those places were probably managed with fire in the past — and that’s why they look the way they do.”

In other words, the landscapes settlers fell in love with in Jasper and other parks across the country were shaped by fire, but the park conservation model saw fire as a threat, so blazes were quickly extinguished. 

Hoffman thinks the necessary adaptability goes beyond burning and will require bringing on new partners to thin the trees and starve future fires. 

“This is incredibly controversial: forestry really needs to be part of this conversation,” she says. “We cannot do this without forestry.” 

Forestry companies understand the landscape, she says, and have the equipment and skills to thin forests and support fire prevention. 

Building back from Jasper wildfire, and learning from disaster

When the smoke clears in Jasper and the fires begin to die down across Western Canada as winter approaches, the process of rebuilding and re-evaluating will begin. 

Waterton Lakes National Park, nestled southwest of Calgary along the spine of the Rockies, provides a glimpse into the future for Jasper.

The Kenow fire burned 44 per cent of the vegetated area within Waterton, according to Parks Canada. It destroyed the tree canopy in many areas, leaving ash and mineral soil behind. 

But plants soon started to sprout. Wildlife returned to develop new patterns as Parks Canada stayed on high alert to monitor the landscape and fight invasive species. 

“From an ecological perspective, a landscape can be very sensitive to use after fire,” Bell says. “In terms of soil stability, in terms of introduction of invasive species, a lot of this stuff can happen in a post-fire environment.” 

Martel calls Jasper “one of the leading communities” in preparing for wildfires and trying to mitigate their impacts. Among other initiatives, Jasper implemented fire-smart practices and built a community fuel break to slow any potential fire. 

“There is just so far you can go and then sometimes you have a situation like the one we’ve had this past week, where even with all that preparation work, it only gets you so far, unfortunately,” he says. 

He takes solace in the fact most of the town was saved and it appears much of the critical infrastructure remains in place, making it easier to rebuild. But he acknowledges it’s hard to ignore the question whether more could have been done. 

Martel says reviews will take place and Parks Canada will dive deep into what happened, and why, and try to learn from the fire, but that will come later, not while the fire still burns. 

Bell says it’s critical to listen to all voices that want a say in how Jasper builds back, but agrees it will take time.

“I think it would be unfair to start pointing fingers or to kind of think about any big take-home messages without waiting to see,” he says. “It’s still really fresh.”

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