A Kelowna-based wildfire equipment company is aiming to share B.C. technology with the rest of Canada and the world.
Earlier this year, WASP Wildfire – a Kelowna-based company specializing in providing wildfire-fighting equipment to organizations across North America – announced its expansion to Canada’s east coast in Nova Scotia.
“They are now having wildfire activity that they’ve never seen in their history,” WASP CEO Randy Cowling said about Nova Scotia. “In the last five years now on the eastern coast of Canada, and the United States, they’re having wildfires that they just didn’t have 20 years ago.”
In the company’s new home province of Nova Scotia, the provincial government reported that nearly 8,900 hectares of land were burned in 2025. Since 2019, it’s the second worst wildfire season Nova Scotia has faced, only surpassed by 2023, when wildfires consumed over 23,000 hectares of land.
The same story applies to Canada as a whole, as the Canadian National Fire Database says that 2023 and 2024 have the two worst wildfire seasons in the last 20 years of Canadian history, and the amount of affected land is generally trending upwards.
In B.C., a province historically faced with devastating wildfire seasons, had also seen an increase in wildfire severity. From 2021 to 2025, wildfires have burned over 800,000 hectares every year well a number well above its 17 year average.
Providing equipment to combat wildfires across the country, Cowling said he’s relying on – and developing – simple but innovative B.C. technology he reckons has saved thousands of homes.
He’s speaking about, and selling, a simple piece of equipment – sprinklers.
Product Development
Gutter mount sprinklers are a patented product of WASP across North American countries, and are part of the company’s home protection kit.
The sprinklers act as a proactive defence measure against wildfires, creating an area of humidity around homes that puts out burning embers as they approach a structure.
“A lot of people think that a wildfire will just race up to a house and light the house on fire. That’s just not the case,” Cowling said, explaining the need for sprinklers.
He said that the real danger lies in small, wind-blown embers that can fly for dozens of kilometres. The embers risk landing on the roof of a structure, which is the usually the largest surface area on a building.
Embers getting into vents or gutters fairs even worse for the building owner, as more debris means more fuel for a fire, which can eventually grow to engulf a home.
Cowing said in many cases across North America, fire departments normally act in a reactive manner to structure fires during wildfires, focusing on putting out fires after they happen.
He specifically mentioned the devastating 2025 Los Angeles fires, where this reactive approach led to the use of so much water that hydrants were running dry, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times.
Kelowna had found itself in a similar situation during the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fire which destroyed 236 homes. Cowling said the massive wildfire forced BC Wildfire Services (BCWS) to reduce water usage, and invest into the development of proactive wildfire defences such as a sprinkler system.
Years after that, Cowling and WASP co-founder Darrell Pyke – who is now retired – had the idea to take this kind of equipment and refine them to protect homes, developing the gutter mount, allowing fire departments and home owners to easily attach the sprinkles to protect roofs.
Since the company’s inception in 2011, Cowling said WASP has been lucky to have a relationship with BCWS that has allowed them both to advance this type of structure protection equipment.
“WASP has been able to work alongside BC Wildfire in taking their specifications, but making them and manufacturing them in a volume way that we can make them less expensive, and we can try to provide not just individual equipment where we have pumps over here… but in a package that works for fire departments (of any size),” Cowling said.
WASP specializes in the distribution of other equipment as well, such as their type 2 trailer, another piece of equipment specified by BCWS. The trailer acts as a mobile hub for wildfire protection containing hundreds of sprinklers and thousands of feet of fire hose in them.
Using these technologies, WASP acts as a manufacturer and a distributor to the masses, supplying provincial governments and local fire departments with the equipment.
In Canada, WASP works with over 250 fire departments in all parts of the country. Their kits are also available in some retailers like COSTCO.
Expanding Markets
WASP is also active internationally, working mainly in the private sector in the U.S. and Australia.
Despite the vast resources available in countries like the U.S., Cowling said the BCWS surpasses it and most other worldwide wildfire-fighting organizations in its structure protection systems.
“(B.C.) They have the best system on it that I’ve ever seen. If you go to Europe they have no system like that, the U.S. has no sprinkler system in place in any state that I’m aware of. Even in Canada (sprinklers) are starting to get more progressive as it goes across the country as more and more provinces run into wildfires,” he said.
“It’s just been good for WASP to work alongside that and be able to learn from that and implement that program in other areas.”
He added that in Canada other provinces, such as Alberta, are looking to BCWS and its equipment when developing their own specifications.
“As other provinces start to come on, they look to British Columbia and they look at the spec on their equipment and go ‘why are they using that spec and how do we implement that in our province or our area?”
In the U.S., Cowling said WASP’s type 2 trailers are attracting interest from some American states, specifically South Carolina.
He said WASP’s gutter mount sprinklers are patented outside of North America as well, in both Australia and in the European Union, two places also facing increased wildfire risk.
For the 15-year-old company, these ambitions and global demand aren’t just shrewd business, they’re a stark reminder of a global climate crisis.
“It’d be pretty hard to argue anyone in my industry that climate change is not real. It’s fairly obvious that it is,” he said. “Everything I’ve seen is that it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”