City aims to be ‘proactive’ with proposed wildfire risk mitigation strategy

Smoke from wildfires blankets the city as a couple has a picnic in Edmonton Alberta, on Saturday May 11, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

A plan for mitigating wildfire risk in Edmonton’s river valley has been finished and presented to city council.

City officials believe Edmonton is among the first major Canadian cities, if not the first, to develop such a plan, recognizing its beloved river valley is the very thing that raises wildfire risk in the face of climate change.

“We just didn’t want to be complacent,” fire chief David Lazenby told reporters after the strategy was presented to the Community and Public Services Committee on Monday.

“We’re seeing repeated drought conditions: hot, dry, windy weather. We also have, unfortunately, examples of other municipalities experiencing wildland urban interface fires – some fairly significant: Jasper, as an example,” added Ashley Hynes, a senior environmental project manager who helped develop the plan. “So the motivation was to be proactive, to understand what our risks are locally, and really dive into what we have covered, what we’re currently doing, and where the gaps are.”

The strategy proposes more hands-on vegetation management including reducing fuel loads, building wildfire resilience into regulatory and land-use planning frameworks, making more neighbourhoods FireSmart, and expanding the city’s tactical emergency wildland response training program.

The committee recommended city council approve immediately applying for a $32,000 grant from the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta to expand its FireSmart programming. Last year, Skunk Hollow became Edmonton’s first neighbourhood to be a recognized FireSmart community.

City council will also have to consider to what extent it wants and can afford to implement the rest of the strategy. A full implementation over four years is estimated to cost between $8 million and $11 million. Implementing only the highest-priority items over four years, then the remaining items later, would cost between $2 million and $6 million.

According to city administration, every $1 not invested in wildfire preparedness could result in $22 in lost future economic activity.

“It’s just essentially money well spent,” Lazenby added. “We’ve seen the devastating losses in other communities. You’re talking billions of dollars if you don’t do things in a proactive way.”

The city is also expanding this year on other tactics to reduce wildfire risk. After conducting its first prescribed burn in March 2025 in the Northeast River Valley Park, it will carry out another prescribed burn this year in Jan Reimer Park. And after launching last year a drone-monitoring program which looks for signs of fire in the river valley on a daily basis during times of high risk, it is also working to install a smoke-detecting sensor network.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Jeremy Thompson