Wildfire risk to existing assets can be prioritised rather than guessed, but only where desktop modelling is paired with structure-level field survey.
The 2024 Jasper fire burned about 33,000 hectares. By the standards of the 2023 season, when British Columbia alone saw more than 2,240 fires burn 2.84 million hectares, that is a small fire. It destroyed 358 of Jasper’s 1,113 structures, forced 25,000 people out, and produced $1.31 billion in insured losses on CatIQ’s July 2025 estimate, making it the second costliest fire event in Canadian history behind Fort McMurray. Ten fire-related catastrophe events have been declared across four provinces and one territory since 2023, and Jasper alone accounts for close to half their combined insured cost.
That ratio is the whole point. Fire consequence tracks what a fire reaches, not how far it travels. Mine operators have felt this directly: Artemis Gold’s Blackwater and Cameco’s Cigar Lake have both faced wildfire-driven evacuations in recent years, disruptions that appear on production reports rather than only in incident logs.
One vulnerability recurs. Long transmission lines running to remote mines are frequently the single point of failure, and they are almost never the asset an operator has hardened. A fire does not need to reach the site to stop production. One span of corridor will do it, and remote sites typically carry backup generation sized for hours rather than for the weeks a corridor rebuild takes.
Which is why the assessment needs two layers. GIS modelling built on 30-year climate normals and short-term fire probability forecasts is good at what it is for: showing where fire is statistically likely to move and how fast. It cannot tell you what is sitting in that path at a specific tower, substation or portal. Field survey closes that gap. Fuel-load counts, vegetation mapping and defensible-space assessment at named structures catch the things a map cannot hold: a transformer sited mid-slope where fire runs uphill, fuel accumulated against one building because that is where the grader stopped pushing.
| The combined picture is what produces a ranked list, and the ranking is the deliverable. Almost no capital budget retrofits a whole portfolio at once, so the practical question is never what to protect. It is what to protect first. The interventions themselves are well understood: siting away from upslope exposure, wider separation between structures, non-combustible roofing, firebreaks along linear infrastructure. The hazard map alone does not tell you where to spend, which is why an assessment that stops at the map has done half the job and billed for all of it. Most portfolios were assessed once, against the fire regime of their design era. The gap between that regime and the last three seasons is not a modelling refinement. It is a different set of assumptions, and reassessment happens before a season or it happens as a claim. PRI conducts wildfire and burn risk assessment for existing infrastructure. Contact the practice to discuss an asset portfolio. |
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“We think about sustainability in terms of hundreds of years.”
Dwight Crouse, RPF
Director, Sustainability & Analytics
dwight.crouse@priengineering.com