Three B.C. communities separated by more than 200 kilometres have agreed to a collective response to wildfires.

The Quesnel, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House fire departments in the province’s Cariboo region have set up a mutual aid agreement that will allow dispatchers to immediately send crews from all three communities to respond to wildfires in the region.

Currently, any requests for additional resources need to go through the province, contributing to delays during the crucial early moments of suppression efforts, said Evan Dean, fire chief and director of protective services for the City of Williams Lake.

“It’s honestly a big relief for us just because we don’t have a lot of major city supports,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to have this as, kind of, our bigger response model when we really need it.”

Mutual aid agreements are frequently set up in areas where major municipalities border on each other, but are less common in places like the Cariboo region, where major population centres are spread out over hundreds of kilometres.

Williams Lake, at just over 10,000 people, is the largest city in the region, separated by about 120 kilometres of highway from Quesnel to the north and 90 kilometres from 100 Mile House to the south.

Dean said the need for mutual aid became apparent in 2024 when his team responded to the River Valley fire in city limits, after a tree fell on power lines leading to several evacuations.

During that event, he said, there were “procedural delays” that slowed the process of bringing in crews from other cities to help.

In that scenario, he said, a request was put into the province for help, and the province then went through other cities to check if they had resources to offer before they could be dispatched.

Under the new mutual agreement, he said, the process would be streamlined because all three cities have agreed to respond as needed.

“It’s dispatched through 911 and they’re immediately sent out, just like if they were dispatched within their own community,” he said.

“So it’s considerably faster.”

Dean said the province has always been helpful but setting up the new agreement simply allows crews to move more quickly in a region that has been hit by major wildfires over the past decades, including ones that caused the entirety of Williams Lake and 100 Mile House to be evacuated.

Looking ahead, he said, he and his colleagues are constantly preparing and seeking ways to prevent major issues.

“I don’t think there’s a fire chief in any rural fire department that doesn’t feel like wildfires are a part of our thing,” he said. “In terms of this year, it’s supposed to be another hot one and so we’re doing what we can do to be prepared.”