Despite a much later start, the 2018 wildfire season in BC is now the worst on record.
Over 1.25 million hectares have burned across the province since April 1st with several fires of note in the Prince George and Northwest Fire Centres including Shovel Lake, which is still 91,000 hectares in size.
However, there are a couple of main differences from last year according to Fire Information Officer Amanda Reynolds.
“This year we’ve had almost 800 more fires than we did last year and so this year, what is different from last is that the fires were all across the entire province and in 2017, the majority of the fires were located in the Cariboo and Kamloops fire centres.”
“August 1st of this year we only saw about 78,000 hectares had burned across the province and now we’re over 1.25 million, which is a significant difference from last year in the number of hectares that burned in August as compared to when the season did start.”
However, she isn’t entirely convinced the two most-recent seasons will constitute a troubling trend going forward.
“It’s certainly significant that we’ve seen two really busy fire seasons back-to-back but I think it’s too early to be drawing conclusions that this is the new normal.”
The Prince George Fire Centre have been swept off their feet during this year’s crisis responding to blazes left, right and centre.
“For the Prince George Fire Centre, we’ve had an extremely busy season since April. We had that huge fire bust in the Peace, we had another lightning bust in June, a little one in July and then another one in August. For Prince George, we’ve had over 400 fires and we’ve had the most fires throughout the entire province.”
Reynolds adds this year’s season is being aided mostly by Mother Nature.
“One thing that is different from last year is the amount of lightning-caused fires and of course we can’t prevent those. This year we’ve seen 1,400 fires started by lightning and last year that number didn’t even exceed a thousand.”
In 2017, over 1.21 million hectares burned.
Before the last two summers, the most ravaging wildfire season occurred in 1958.
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