Reduced Highway Maintenance vs Fire

[Joe Public]

Since the BC Liberals took power; highways maintenance has been reduced by up to 60%. One of the areas of reduction has been the mowing of the dead grass on the shoulders of our highways.

Most fires are now defined as "human caused", which means that a careless cigarette or a vehicle pulling over onto the shoulder of the road has ignited them.

Obviously, there must be a correlation with the increase in human caused fires and the reduction of highway maintenance.

[Always Sunny]

"Most" are not defined as human caused. It's still about 50/50 on average (http://bcwildfire.ca/history/average.htm).

However, the fires of greatest concern (interface fires) tend to be human caused, simply because people tend to do stupid things where people live.

Human caused wildfires aren't all cigarettes tossed in a grassy ditch.
- Unattended camp fires
- ATVs
- Train activity
- Logging and industry
- Chip piles
- Improper burning of slash
- Garbage dumps, etc.

Then again, I probably missed all of the sarcasm in your post.

[BoB76]

What will the NDP do? Water flowers for all the Picketing road crews walking the highways?

[Atomoa]

I remember when all our highways looked groomed and you could make turns onto the highway without having to pull out into traffic past the "weed line" in order to see.

I never thought about this but we keep the sides of our roads as if they were tinderboxes - letting weeds and shrubs grow all of July and August along our highways. If a cigarette gets tossed out a car window, it ends up in the tinderbox we've provided.

Forest fighting budget + property loss = budget for roadside maintenance?

How many fires from "ignition points" on the side of roads? Won't be hard to get some data.