thanks for having us on the call my name is michael benson i'm with fp innovations i'm the manager of wildfire operations there and fb innovations for anyone who doesn't know is a not-for-profit uh four sector research group based in canada uh we kind of stretch all all across canada um the video we're going to watch today is one that was put together by fp innovations uh partnership with a number of different partners um so joining from fp innovations today is uh charles friesen who is a senior researcher in forestry for fb innovations he was the project lead on this on this video uh he wrote the content and he's the narrator as well and along uh with him is greg baxter who's our senior researcher for wildfire operations and then myself the manager of wildfire operations and uh just while jonathan's still looking for that button there um we uh so i'm reading natasha's comment there um the wildfire operations group were based primarily in western canada we we have staff in alberta and british columbia and and focus on wildfire operational research thank you very much uh all right i'm gonna see what happens when i hit this and just give me feedback if you're hearing something or not sure we have built our towns can you hear that industries roads and critical infrastructure yes we are in the path of a natural destructive cycle in the face of our changing climate these cycles are being affected in ways we don't yet understand we need to prepare our communities as best we can forest researchers and scientists including governments industry and universities are working with vulnerable communities to find solutions and develop strategies when a forest burns an immense amount of energy is released uncontrolled this energy has enormous destructive potential in 2018 fires in british columbia released enough energy to power all of canada for an entire year can human ingenuity adapt to this natural fire cycle and redirect this enormous energy potential to constructive ends fp innovations a not-for-profit forest research company has been studying this proposition the forest will burn will look into a bold and innovative new strategy to both mitigate the destructive power of forest fires while at the same time harnessing the energy for constructive purposes in british columbia the entire land base has been classified into broad ecosystems called biogeoclinic zones the land base has also been classified by the normal cycles of natural disturbance that occur in each area for example much of interior bc is classified as natural disturbance type 3 or ndt3 in the ecosystems of ndt3 the natural disturbance pattern is called frequent stand initiating events these events typically occur every 100 to 125 years the disturbance is almost always fire or perhaps a widespread mountain pine beetle outbreak which might be followed a few years later by fire a stand initiating fire destroys nearly all the trees and resets the natural conditions for the stands to replace itself my name is charles friesen i'm a senior researcher at fp innovations focusing on biomass and fiber supply in this video we are going to visit three remote first nations communities in british columbia each of these communities is off-grid which means that they are not connected to either the electrical infrastructure grid or the natural gas grid they are also surrounded by forest and are threatened by forest fires because of the natural disturbance patterns in their ecosystems we begin our journey with a tiny community of clusters it almost looks like a tornado and the wind goes so strong and all the trees are clean it's so dry and it'll burn so fast we really try we're probably always pretty sure we lost this reserve to the amelia couple um we make medicine and then we're picking berries and the same place wherever we go they order it's all burned down there's nothing great so also make me cry because i feel [Music] something [Music] down there so we didn't do nothing [Music] well in terms of the size of the fire 520 000 hectares is really hard to imagine when you get up into the air and you're able to look you can see that the fire where it burned from our community you can fly about an hour and a half to williams lake my name is neil gatro i work for the loose guys today nation currently standing in one of our fuel treatment zones on cluskas ir1 [Music] well we've had a number of wildfires go through our area over the last these 12 years we've been evacuated five times within that we had an assessment done to see what the fuel rating was within our area and in this particular area we had a very high rating of fuels that had a lit would go right into the community well we had a rpf come in a registered professional forester come in and do a treatment for it take a look to see what types of fuels we had out on the land we've had mountain pine beetle come through the area here so we've got a whole lot of dead standing trees we've had a lot of dead standing trees i should say with uh different types of ladder fuel that should the fire start in the ground it would quickly spread the trees into the grounds and in doing so we had to have someone come in and remove approximately 10 hectares or 2 000 meters cubed of dead timber to help reduce the overall wildfire rating all the wood that we've taken off this site will be used for community firewood it can be used for construction we can do a number of things other than sell it so what we're looking at is potentially using it as fuel and chip for a potential combined heat and power source well we're going to be bringing on this combined heat and power source to reduce or hopefully eliminate our reliance on our generators and the diesel fuel that we've been burning decrease our carbon footprint generator powers the whole town it burns like 200 liters in 24 hours [Music] these kind of systems provide an ideal solution because we are producing energy locally we're not used burning oil or natural gas that that has to be imported from somewhere else [Music] right now we're at the national research council in vancouver at their site where together with ubc and fb innovations have built a test site for small scale combined heated power systems where we can de-risk test them and bring people here to showcase technology and also train them so the risking entails putting this system through extreme conditions so and then seeing what the response of the unit is is pretty much like test driving the car the chips are extracted go through a number of conveyors usually the fines are removed and then are fed into the gasifier itself where they're then gasified so it produces a syn gas which is then fed into a internal combustion engine which produces electricity over generator and also waste heat which that waste tea we use again to dry those wood chips and as well heats buildings in the community we're now standing in front of the chp combined heat and power unit this particular one is from finland the company is called walter and it's enclosed in a 40-foot c-can which makes it ideal for transportation um it's basically all enclosed in one container which includes the reactor itself gas cleaning as well as the engine generator set so if this thing arrives on site all you need to do is hook up your electricity and your heat connections and you're more or less good to go and we're replacing fossil fuels we're doing something to combat climate change and we're also making sure that communities are safe from from fires next we visit the community of alkali lake [Music] it is a natural disturbance type 4 which is called frequent stand maintaining fires past forest management and fighter suppression practices have led to a buildup of surface biomass called ladder fuels in the forest understory the people of alkali lake have undertaken their own forest management activities that reflect more historically natural ecosystem conditions the forest will burn its western [Music] [Music] is the center of the people of the white earth the escadam community uh the focus of my program is restoring the fire maintaining ecosystems which are the natural disturbance type four so that's a low severity frequent uh stand maintaining fires that would move through these ecosystems everything evolves in these forests around succession so uh fire is the main disturbance including insects and pathogens so what happens um if you exclude fire is that successions that have taken place in amongst the veterans and you have multiple layers that start building up and start making that forest into a denser stand [Music] normally uh the practice of the people ancestors they controlled a lot of the fuels in the forest they did a lot of burning this treatment here is one of our field treatments that are within um three kilometers from alcohol lake my name is derek stanislaus i am the area supervisor for alpine resource management so for what you see on the left if we had a wildfire come through was the amount of fuel that we have with the dead branches going up the trees and the field with the lower brush on the ground if i were to come in here it has a greater chance of getting into the crown and and we have no control over it but with the fire on in our treated side if the fire is coming in on the ground it's with the less fuel load it's not going to burn as intense as the untreated side and if we ever do get into the crowd because of the spacing density we have there's very like no no risk of traveling as high and intense and as fast as the untreated side at this site we are doing a fuel treatment hazard reduction and it's a primary fuel break [Music] at the same time we're using the fuel to help supply the biomass plant in our community they're standing here in front of our biomass project that was started about eight years ago is a heat heating system that we have piped into the ground it's about a four million dollar system that we hope is going to pay for itself in the next four to ten years uh over the years what has happened is uh we're finding that we're paying more into propane into heating our buildings and they're here in our community our elder center our health center our grand office our school and the store and it also uh blazes a trail for other first nations that they can come here a number of first nations have come and looked at the plant and they're thinking like hey we can do this in my community the people of alkali lake have used a thinning fire smoker to reduce their risk in nvt4 next we visit the production nation at fourth grade [Music] we're in a very heavily forested area surrounded by spruce uh aspen wilson lots of dead pine because of the landfill and uh yeah so very very high risk with uh it's it's a situation where it's a matter of not if but when there's gonna be repair you look at flyers enemies they're not they're not just a horse fire the firestorms [Music] because of this threat of fire a treatment regime was recommended it is appropriate where a natural disturbance pattern of stand initiating fires or crown fires occurs every 100 to 125 years the idea is for hazard reduction rates to imitate this natural disturbance frequency and provide biomass to produce energy in a power plant the community is at the center of the rings each ring is two kilometers wide this is wide enough to reduce the chance of a catastrophic fire and improve detection and suppression the interface zone can use a special type of fire smart treatment that involves thinning and pruning the sand like we saw in alkali lake the inner ring is cut over the course of 12 years it is divided into 12 equal sections and one section is cut each year each year's harvest is replanted after cutting so that supply is continual and the forest always grows back to support local plant and animal species the inner ring is cut first to immediately reduce the hazard for the town the first area cut in each ring is in the direction of the prevailing winds the next ring to be cut is the outer ring over 40 years in order to reduce risk to the growing stock then the next outermost ring is cut then the final ring is cut once a section is cut it will provide significant resistance to fire development until age 20 and good resistance to fire till 8 40. meaning a four kilometer width of land is reducing the chance of catastrophic fire because the regrowing trees are small and have widely spaced crowns once the last ring is cut after 100 years the first ring will be ready for cutting again this is the system that was recommended in fort ware a combined heat and power biomass plant has been in operation in fort ware for three and a half years [Music] uh the biomass system the changes that it's made is nothing but positivity a word creation and even in the future if it doesn't make us a whole bunch of money it's going to be energy for the people here at home we're creation and just just sell sustainability that's what production nation is all about we don't want to have to ask for too much we want to create things to make sure that we are our own bosses here my name is eric hawkins i'm a community works manager here at graduation forward bc so we're in the maintenance department the housing department and we look at the biomass and greenhouse system basically the biomass right now feeds uh electricity back into the grid meeting us with bc hydro eventually into the future we may want to push the biomass project and get more more energy back to the grid so the biomass system themselves in an aboriginal nation creates a lot of windows for separate trades to be trained yeah a lot a lot of point of opportunity when it comes to the chips the harvesting of the wood from the field there's a lot of jobs around these biomass systems for information and it's an exciting thing because these are the jobs that community members love you know working with the wood going out there you know even with the chipper plan for the biology people love that kind of work and our sawmill is great because there's a little bit of value added we mill the timber here for our own our own uses and also well to build the bridge mods and supply board and battering for the homes in the community and it provides jobs local jobs and employable houses and docks well biomass system is kind put together just to basically take our beetle filled wood we do woodlot cutting for most of the beetle filled wood which is also fire prevention for the nation also the the extras from our mill project itself we produce uh even power to these machines the engine alone is cooled by it's it doesn't use antifreeze we use water cooling and uh we ship all that glycol and plus water to the school and to the greenhouse our heating system for the school is when it was designed was the propane off of propane boilers and now because of our bio energy plant we supplement the propane with the bio plant some of the residual effects of the plant like the greenhouse provides lots of educational opportunities with production of fresh vegetables from a biomass from next door that's a good waste facility is me through the air here and then i have propane burners here as well so i'm going on that road in the greenhouse here at fort wearing photography nation in this greenhouse we're growing tomatoes three kinds of these tomatoes on the vine beefsteak and cherry tomatoes and i have a bit of melons in here as well and then there is not a greenhouse with cucumbers and peppers and with a bit of a propagation area for starting and then there's a third greenhouse where i have some cola props like beans corn is in there right now with some carrots and so on uh success as in producing it's producing enough for the whole community i'm looking into some markets so we are looking into some markets neighborhood community and some camps around maybe mine next year as well otherwise i'm producing very much for the population here that's that's for sure [Music] okay uh i'm going to stop it there there's another 30 seconds or so but i just have to say as somebody who's not in the forestry industry or business i was really excited by this and it's it to me it's such a really neat set of examples of sustainability and um i i wanted to share we don't have much time right now but we do have a number of the fp innovation people here um if you have questions and um oh i think that people are giving me instructions on how to do the audio i'll pass that um but i i would be interested in how scalable this is and we've seen in the film we see three really nice examples of different uh different types of forests and different types of power systems that are used um could this be done in washington and oregon are there plans to expand these kinds of activities in bc uh michael or any of your comment colleagues i'd be really interested in your thoughts yeah this is uh charles uh charles hi yeah i narrated some of the video and put together the ideas and created it essentially um you know in the video uh the smallest community the first one is about uh 40 people and the last one is about 300 people and these communities are off-grid communities um they talked a little about the grid he met the local grid which is basically run by diesel generators diesel is trucked in about uh about 450 kilometers which is close to 300 miles um so um you know it's sort of targeted for uh communities of of that size or slightly larger maybe up to 3 000 people or so uh when you get into something bigger than that of course there's all kinds of other challenges um yeah with land use but they're fairly contained communities and so a fire protection uh or fire hazard reduction system um that produces energy for a local grid uh you know is is very appropriate well in the 100 plus year time frame was also very impressive that you know this yeah so what are these seven generation solutions we're basically trying to imitate the natural disturbance so um you know in in these areas uh the natural disturbance is a fire uh that occurs about every hundred years or so so uh the plan is that the the area that will produce the uh protection or fire hazard production uh is is scaled to to operate over a hundred year time frame you know if that occurs that would be almost miraculous but uh you never know right and with climate change the time scales are are changing as well but i mentioned to michael on a call yesterday that it would be great to have a few of you come and do a separate presentation without the video i mean now that everybody or many people have seen it but just so we could learn more about the range of things that fp innovations is doing and what kind of role you as a non-profit uh play compared to what the the folks in um bc wildfire or the u.s forest service or the timber companies uh do so other other questions there's something in the chat um as you can see while you're looking at the chat there jonathan we'd be happy to come back and talk about those things very much thank you great june you had a question maybe yeah i was just wondering if there's been any efforts to look at the or estimate the health co-benefits of of this approach sorry the which benefits sorry health health health benefits um there has been no measurement um the you know the information we have is anecdotal the communities say things like you know our young people are staying in the community we're creating a lot of jobs um the uh the production of vegetables in fort ware i mean previously any vegetables that reached them were at least a week old by the time they got there you know now they are literally getting them off the vine eating them the same day so it's just anecdotal that's all we have at this point but presumably similar situations would apply to native american communities in the us and um again i'd be very interested in following up with you on on that um any last last questions or comments i was going to say from my perspective one of the things that stuck out to me in the movie in the movie really was that association of both community protection and economic development into the one project and really that as you highlighted yourself jonathan that that focuses on sustainability the looking out 100 years um and that independence for some pretty remote first nation communities so i think when you patch that all together it's it's pretty powerful solution for those for those communities yes and i think part of the idea behind this cascadia corridor initiative is for there to be mutual learning uh among oregon washington british columbia but i think it's also encouraging more exchange of ideas within those the province in the two states and i think this is an example of a project that should really get more visibility if it hasn't so far okay okay um so that's going to be it for today we do have a full schedule for the rest of october and uh open to people who would like to present in november and december um and uh we'll have this event on october 27th that i'll send you information about there is a link in the email that i sent out about today to the film but otherwise uh you can just google uh the forest will burn fp innovations and you'll find it quite easily and um last thing uh so we have a website for this group and i've just been updating the the people on it i'm trying to link a website for every person who's part of the group um but i i'm just sort of finding them through linkedin so i'll send out an announcement about it and if you could look at the website i put for you if you'd want some one different one just let me know and i'll change it so again thanks to the fp people thanks doug for a really great presentation and look forward to seeing you all next week