The City of Kamloops will be conducting a series of tabletop scenarios and field training exercises in a bid to prepare for the upcoming fire season.

Deputy Fire Chief Ryan Cail says the whole of community approach is aimed at ensuring that people have the necessary skills and knowledge to respond to interface fires effectively.

“The fires that we’re seeing on the landscape are requiring resources of all kinds of measures, and the collaborative approach is going to be the result – the successful result – in protecting the community and the people that live in and around the community,” Cail told Radio NL.

“Everybody has a part to play in it and by bringing everybody to the table we’re ensuring we are all on the same playbook. It’s kind of like a gigantic unified command thing where we’re all reaching in to each other’s abilities and knowledge and putting together really good strategies and tactics.”

As part of the initiative, Cail says the City’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan – which is overseen by the Parks and Civic Facilities Division and outlines the wildfire mitigation strategy – will be updated to ensure it is both relevant and effective in addressing current challenges facing the community.

“It focuses on reducing wildfire risks on City-owned land, outlining specific goals, such as identifying and quantifying forestland wildfire threats, mapping fuel management treatment areas, establishing guidelines for fuel management, prioritizing new fuel management activities, and enhancing wildfire suppression access to public lands surrounding the community,” the City said, in a statement.

Cail also notes there will be proactive wildfire mitigation work done in partnership with Kamloops residents, City staff, and a number of different partner agencies.

“Collaboration is key in our efforts to mitigate the threat of wildfires,” Cail said. “By working with our partner agencies and community partners, we can effectively address wildfire risks and ensure the safety and resilience of our community.”

“We need community associations to work on the risk in their areas, we need BC Wildfire to identify threats in the urban interface areas. We recognize the importance of healthy fire on the landscape to reduce fuel. We recognize the importance of bringing to the table CSOs expertise and the RCMP.”

The City intends to put together a working group to deal with any post-disaster recovery, with the goal of avoiding drawn-out delays in the event of a rebuild.

“If we happen to lose a loss of life, or structures, in any of our neighbourhoods, what does recovery look like?” Emergency Preparedness Manager Will Beatty told Radio NL.

“How can we facilitate that recovery piece in the response phase, so that once the response has concluded, we can instantly start to rebuild.”

In the meantime, Kamloops Fire and Rescue is urging people to continue to FireSmart their properties, noting there has been an uptick in interest in the program this year.

“We’re actually starting to see a lot of buy-in with the FireSmart stuff,” KFR Life Safety Educator Jeff Pont said. “I think the people of Kamloops are doing a great job.”

The City is currently in the process of hiring a FireSmart Coordinator, with that person now expected to be on the job by the end of June.