The wildfire burning southwest of Deka Lake is now being held.
Erin Bull, a Fire Information Officer with the BC Wildfire Service, says they are now confident that they will be able to contain it to 650 hectares.
“What that means is that we are confident that the resources available that we currently have working on the fire that it will not grow any further or escape its current borders. In the coming days we’re going to be able to start reallocating resources from that fire over to the Canim Lake fire.”
The South of Canim Lake wildfire has essentially doubled in size.
We asked Bull if that was the case, or if they just have better mapping of it.
” I would say it’s a combination of both. There certainly was some growth over the last probably two days, and yesterday (Wednesday) was the time we were able to get a better map of the perimeter and update that size to 11-hundred hectares.”
Bull says it is still moving away from the communities though.
She says they are continuing to work on protecting communities.
“Our primary objective is to determine a location to put a line of heavy machine guard in, so that’s going to be on the northwest flank of the fire, which is between the communities and the fire.”
Bull says they have two structural protection specialists working in that area, assessing properties in the event that there is a need to put structural protection in place.
An Incident Management Team is now in charge of both the Deka Lake and Canim Lake wildfires, as well as 26 other wildfires burning north of Highway 24 and east of Highway 97 right now.
That includes a fire west of Succour Lake that is not a fire of note, but is about 470 hectares in size.
That is on the northwest side of Canim Lake.