Parks Canada permitted the perfect conditions for disaster

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As of Thursday afternoon, heart-wrenching images from Jasper show that, at least on some streets, only charred beams remain after a wildfire, 400 feet high in some places, ravaged the townsite last night. Elsewhere, fortunately, buildings appeared untouched by the flames, but that’s only so helpful.

Losses have been described as “significant”; from her limited point of view, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith estimated the extent of the damage to be a potential 30 to 50 per cent, but the official toll will come from Parks Canada. And though the fire blew in from Alberta’s forest protection zone, Jasper is the responsibility of the federal government. Thus it’s Ottawa that’s in charge of the park’s forest management and, crucially, fire mitigation.

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A heavy dread has set in that a very special place has been lost, or at least irreversibly changed, but with that comes another sting: that this was a problem of human making, and that it was one that park authorities should have addressed long ago.

Warnings of a mega-fire have rumbled for years in Jasper. Preventing fires has been the priority for many of the years since the park’s inception in 1907, in the interest of preserving the forest. But the forest naturally burns on cycles ranging from 50 to 200 years — old, dead growth must ignite to clear out dead carbon and make way for young trees and grassy meadows.

In the 1980s, some........

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