Front Burner

Wildfire seasons are getting worse, and the list of communities destroyed by wildfires keeps growing. Do we need a better approach to handling them?

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In the foreground, you can see burned-out wreckage of a home with only a chimney still standing. In the background is a forest, with some trees blackened and a charred pickup truck.
A property on Okanagan Indian Band land that was destroyed by the Bradley Creek wildfire is seen, in Vernon, B.C., on Tuesday, August 4, 2026. Okanagan Indian Band Chief Dan Wilson said on Tuesday that about 230 homes have been destroyed in one of the worst wildfire losses in recent Canadian history. THE CANADIAN PRESS/ Darryl Dyck (THE CANADIAN PRESS / Darryl Dyck)

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Front Burner27:05Why aren’t we more ready for wildfires?

Thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes throughout B.C. due to wildfires over the past week. The province warns that the fires could get worse in the coming days.

The list of communities devastated by wildfires, and the intensity of the fires themselves, keeps growing.  What was once a rare event has become disturbingly common. So why haven’t we figured out a better way to fight wildfires? And what could we be doing differently?

Mike Flannigan joins us to answer those questions. He’s a professor of wildland fires at Thompson Rivers University and runs the Canada fire weather outlook. 

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