UBC’s Lori Daniels: Billions spent on earthquake preparedness, but relatively little on preparing for fires

B.C.’s worst recorded wildfire season is still burning, but we should waste no time in learning from this summer of devastation. We have been here before, staring across a landscape of ash and promising to do better next time. Will those promises be kept, or will the province fall as short as it did in years past?  …The government did take steps, creating the strategic wildfire prevention initiative, which gives communities money to clear out a lot of that fuel where it comes close to their boundaries. However, it has shelled out only $78 million to treat just seven per cent of the land that has been identified as high-risk, a small proportion of what was spent fighting fires. …However, as Lori Daniels, an associate professor of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, says, the province has spent billions preparing for a major earthquake that will happen at some point, but relatively little preparing for fires that happen every summer.