Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan

Community feedback for this plan is now closed.

As with many parts of British Columbia, Kamloops is in an active fire environment. In recent years, our community has been surrounded by large, recorded-breaking fires and has been a central hub for emergency response. Wildfire resiliency, prevention, and mitigation are a central focus of our community as fire seasons continue to worsen.

A Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan is the next generation of our Community Wildfire Protection Plan. The City last updated its Community Wildfire Protection Plan in 2016, with extensive work taking place since 1986. To ensure Community Wildfire Protection Plans take a comprehensive approach toward wildfire, including risk reduction and resiliency measures, the BC Wildfire Service partnered with the BC FireSmart Committee to develop a new framework for community wildfire resiliency planning.

The updated plan will assess and identify wildfire threats and vulnerabilities and recommend actions to increase community wildfire resiliency. In addition to identifying areas of highest wildfire threat and risk within and adjacent to the City of Kamloops, this plan is intended to support the city’s municipal and public lands and help provide a better understanding of the seven FireSmart disciplines and how they contribute to wildfire mitigation actions at numerous levels.

The Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan will ultimately provide an action plan to introduce new goals and actions to reduce the overall risk in target areas within our community. It will also include recommendations with different suggested priority levels that, along with input from regional fire departments and other stakeholders, the City will use to develop the next steps to reduce wildfire risk in city limits.

The Wildfire Resiliency Plan will outline the following goals:

• increase the community’s capacity and understanding of wildfire threat and risk
• foster greater interagency collaboration across administrative boundaries
• be a lead role model in FireSmart and wildfire resiliency in the province
• be more responsive to the needs of different types of communities throughout British Columbia
• develop achievable and accountable action items for reducing wildfire threat and risk.

The Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan will be structured to provide information on the plan's goals and development, including public engagement and education and how other plans can relate to the goals and actions of this plan.

The City of Kamloops will continue to face extreme wildfire pressures, which will be exacerbated by climate change. Maintaining a proactive focus on wildfire prevention and mitigation efforts and continuing to build upon current progress levels will enable residents to continually find ways to live safely in an active wildfire environment.

Engagement Opportunity

Residents had the opportunity to complete a short survey to indicate their level of awareness of wildfire mitigation work that the City has completed and continues to do. Understanding residents’ knowledge levels and needs and their involvement in applying FireSmart principles to private property will help develop our plan and the action items used for awareness and education. Paper surveys and the online survey were open for input until October 31, 2024. A summary of what we heard will be shared this spring.