Forest Practices That Cause Fires and Floods
- FTFO
- Aug 14
- 2 min read
Peachland water advocate faces Bald Range wildfire
Taryn Skalbania is the lead on the Peachland Watershed Protection Alliance and lives in Peachland. She has dealt with seven evacuation alerts and three evacuation orders over the years. BC forestry practices over the past decades have left mountainsides bare, stopping snow pack from accumulating for slower spring melts. Forests are critical for so many reasons and with the 100+ fires in BC, they won't be able to be functional for decades.
"Skalbania also picked up on comments from Penticton Indian Band chief Greg Gabriel at a press conference in Penticton last Wednesday that included Premier David Eby, calling for the need to examine the forestry sector and logging practices as culprits of drought and massive forest fires.
"Regarding the recent preponderance of wildfires on the west side of Okanagan Lake, she cited logging was one of several factors playing a role in that occurrence.
“The west side is hit more by the sun. It just seems more intense when wildfires happen,” she said.
"While the absence of past norms for rainfall in the spring and summer is a wildfire trigger, Skalbania also reiterated that snow accumulation and spring runoff are impacted by clear-cut logging.
“When snow falls in a tree canopy, there is a slower snowmelt and runoff,” she said. “In areas that are clear-cut logged, that snow accumulates on the open ground. That water sits on the surface and does not feed into the groundwater, overflowing creeks and streams because it melts quickly and flows straight into Okanagan Lake.
“There is no natural water storage happening, so when we get spring rain on snowpacks in these open areas, it results in huge floods such as what we saw in 2017. When the water all comes at once, we get the flooding.”
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