Cedar Hedges 'Go Up Like a Roman Candle' During Wildfires FireSmart assessments, rebate programs Working with developers and insurers

Experts say it's time they're axed for less flammable trees and shrubs. … Article written by andrea bennett.
The FireSmart BC program website shows a moderately large single-family home through the eyes of a wildfire. As you move your cursor around, fire follows: flaming debris on the unkempt asphalt roof; blazing patio furniture leaning against the garage; potted cedars scorching the siding.
Cedars have been a popular landscape plant in B.C. yards for decades, says Lori Daniels, a professor in the department of forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, and the Koerner chair in wildfire coexistence.
Unfortunately, she says, they "go up like a Roman candle."
As B.C.'s wildfires become more frequent and intense, resulting in evacuations, the loss of homes and businesses, and deaths, experts are encouraging homeowners and developers to remove cedars and junipers, or not plant them at all.
"Cedars are highly flammable when they are dry," Daniels says. "They retain dead foliage."
Most cedars contain quite a lot of dry material at their core, Daniels adds, even when they look green on the outside.
"When we're using cedar hedges for privacy, which is why most people have them, they're really dense," says FireSmart program lead Rachel Woodhurst. "They're very resinous."
During wildfires, Daniels says, embers can travel a long distance, up to three kilometres, in high winds. It's those embers that can set a cedar alight.
And once one cedar catches fire, Woodhurst says, the fire quickly spreads to the whole row.
The cedars then carry the fire from the ground upwards and start throwing off their own embers. The fire can then spread to a home's siding or roof, and, if hedges are being used like fencing, connecting homes, it can quickly move to a neighbour's.
A fire in the 800 block of DeHart and Rowcliffe avenues in Kelowna earlier this year offers a dramatic example. In video captured by Cass Hritzuk, published by Castanet and shared below, a massive ball of flames sends sparks high into the night sky as neighbours look on, and one man tries in vain to slow the spread with a garden hose.
Luckily, firefighters who arrived on scene shortly thereafter were able to extinguish the blaze, which damaged a nearby garage.
People were not as lucky during the 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire, which burned 303 structures in and around West Kelowna.
There were "definitely properties with cedar hedges where it contributed to the loss of the homes," Daniels says.
"It isn't that fire will come up and consume your home," Daniels says. Instead, it's embers. It was embers that were carried over three kilometres, across Lake Okanagan, in 2023.
"We saw it in Jasper, as well," Daniels says. "It was the embers that came off the fire front and then got carried into the community, and it was the homes that were not fire smart that sadly were most vulnerable."
Susanna Klassen and Sean Kearney, who own and run the nine-acre Pickle River Farm in Paradise Valley, on the northern Sunshine Coast, had a free FireSmart assessment done after they purchased their property in 2021.
Woodhurst says FireSmart has conducted over 11,000 such assessments since 2021.
"The very highest-order priority, according to his assessment, was to get rid of the very flammable cedars next to the house and the garage," Klassen says.
The couple had about 60 metres of western red cedar — which had been planted decades earlier to act as a privacy screen from the neighbours next door — to tackle.
Western red cedar is native to B.C. and can often be managed by trimming branches and lifting the crown of the tree over your house, Daniels says.
Klassen and Kearney were aware that a devastatingly massive fire tore through Paradise Valley a century ago.
That history, plus the fact that their cedars were too close together and growing into the power line, and their property includes and borders the forest, made them decide that it was best to remove their hedge and replant ...