After a multi-year process that was hampered at times by the pandemic, Yukon’s Wildland Fire Management has finished and released a draft of their fire prevention plan for Dawson City.

“These plans are a way for communities to determine a strategy for reducing their fire risk and increasing their resilience to the impacts of wildfires,” Lisa Walker, the director of Yukon Wildland Fire Management, said in a Dec. 21 interview with the Star.

Walker wants Dawsonites to give the draft plan a good read and bring their perspectives and ideas to a yet-to-be scheduled engagement session, which is to be held at some point in the new year.

“We want to make sure that we get all those perspectives to not just have a technical report, but one that’s based on that community participation,” Walker said.

The plan lays out how the community can decrease its fire risk through efforts ranging from FireSmart planning for buildings to broader landscape-level forest fire fuel reduction.

The goal is for Wildland Fire Management to eventually create a fire protection plan for every Yukon community.

So far, plans have been completed for Haines Junction and Teslin. Walker highlighted Burwash Landing and Faro as two places in which plans are pretty far along.

Wildland Fire’s website also lists Beaver Creek, Watson Lake and Destruction Bay as places with planning underway.

Whitehorse already has a plan created by the city government, which Wildland Fire uses to guide decision-making for fuel reduction efforts in the region.

Plan specifics

Dawson City and the surrounding area have some unique features, land use and history that were taken into account designing this plan.

These include things that are valuable to the people who live and recreate in the area, but also means things such as mining operations. Some of these values can be far out into the bush and hard to account for.

“So that adds a layer of complexity when we look at the number of values on the landscape and how spread-out they are,” Walker said.

It is also a busy region for firefighting — though many of the fires that burn in the area are naturally occurring and in wilderness areas, which means Wildland Fire can simply allow them to run their course.

The new plan breaks the Dawson City area into four distinct sections: the town itself; Moosehide to the north; West Dawson across the Yukon River; and the east side, which includes the airport, Rock Creek, Bear Creek and Henderson Corner.

Each area poses its own challenges for firefighting and prevention.

The Moosehide area is a small Tr’ondëk Hwëtch’in village and important cultural site. It is about five kilometres north of the town, and is not road- accessible.

Some work has already been done to protect this area, which includes about 20 cabins and other significant structures.

It has open hills with deciduous trees around it that are susceptible to early season fires, but are less flammable during the hottest time of year once green leaves have grown.

Moosehide does not have formal firefighters, so more training for those who use the site is recommended, as well as some additional forest thinning and FireSmart work.

The West Dawson area is unique because it is accessible from the town only by ferry in the summer and an ice road during the winter.

The area also does not have its own fire station.

Mature stands of wood run right up to the communities and homes in the area, though clearing has been done for agricultural purposes.

For this reason, the plan recommends several different levels of forest thinning in the area, including FireSmart projects, cutting some trees for better spacing, and full clearing in some spots to build actual fire guards.

In areas to the east of Dawson City, there are some older neighbourhoods with very little FireSmart protection on many of the properties.

This is particularly true of Bear Creek, which has lots of properties with “little to no clearing of vegetation within the home ignition zone.”

The area does have some benefits for fire suppression, such as the Klondike River, which can provide somewhat of a fire break and has water that could be used for firefighting, and the airport, which is itself a large clearing.

Proposed work in the eastern zone would focus on FireSmart efforts and selective timber harvesting to thin out the forest in some areas.

Dawson City itself is more protected from fire than the surrounding areas as the forest is further from most dwellings, but the plan still identifies some vulnerabilities.

In particular, Dawson’s south and west flanks are composed of dense mixed wood stands that could bring a wildfire into the town.

The plan suggests creating two clearcut fire breaks extending from the Dome lookout, along with extensive FireSmart efforts for properties along the Dome Road and Dome subdivision.

It is also noted that Dawson City has many historic wooden buildings and boardwalks that are highly flammable and that there is a strong desire to protect these structures to preserve the historical nature of the city.

How to participate

The public engagement sessions for locals to give their take on the plan are not scheduled yet, and when they are held may depend partly on when there is a usable ice bridge across the Yukon River to West Dawson.

“I think we want to wait until the new year for consultations in the public to make sure that people from both sides of the river can participate without there being any kinds of barriers caused by freeze-up in Dawson,” said Wildland Fire’s fire information officer Mike Fancie, who joined in on the interview with Walker.

“We just want to make sure that people get the chance to weigh in at that meeting.”

Once these sessions are done, the timeframe for when work could begin will depend on what comes out of the sessions.

Once the plan is finalized, financing for projects will still need to be obtained from government.

Walker said they would likely start with the “low-hanging fruit,” taking care of the easiest and cheapest projects first.

“Rather than start with the hardest, most remote project, you start with the ones that you can get to the fastest or start with the ones where you know this type of treatment is going to be affordable,” she said.

Then they can move on to the bigger stuff.

“Ideally, once the plans are approved, we’ll find the funding and the capacity within the community to start doing some projects like FireSmart projects, fuel breaks, prescribed burning,” she said.

Fancie added that there is a lot of work property owners can do themselves on their properties without making drastic alterations to the landscape.

“You can do a lot to reduce the risk of fire to your property by doing small tasks, like cleaning up your yard in the spring, or making sure that your gutters are clear of debris, without necessarily changing the composition of the property,” he said.

In the meantime, the full plan is available at https://yukon.ca/en/dawson-draft-community-wildfire-protection-plan.