1,391,685 hectares have burned in the Prince George Fire Centre this year, as of this morning (Tuesday).
1,354,284 hectares burned across the entire province in 2018, which, prior to this year, was BC’s worst fire year ever recorded, by hectares burned.
The region has singlehandedly broken the provincial record for hectares burned, as this year’s provincial total closes in on 2 million, sitting currently at 1,827,944.
That is 18,279.44 square kilometres.
“If we were to look at the last 23 years of statistics (in the Prince George Fire Centre) and add up the last 22 years, from 2001 [to 2022], that total would only equal 1.32 million hectares,” Fire Information Officer Davin Richmond told My PG Now.
This season, the Prince George Fire Centre has burned 60,000 hectares more than than the last 22 years, combined.
Richmond said the next highest total for area burned in the fire centre came in 2015 – 213,121 hectares.
588 fires have burned in the Prince George Fire Centre this year, Ricmond said that accounts for 30% of all the fires (1985) in the province.
The Donnie Creek Wildfire, north of Fort St. John, is currently 583,153 hectares large and took the title of the largest fire in the province’s history in June.
The next largest was the 2017 Plateau fire near Williams Lake which evacuated tens of thousands of residents of the Cariboo.
“Within the fire centre and provincially, our resources are getting stretched thin,” Richmond said. “Resourcing is a challenge, we do have resource request orders out provincially to get additional resources… but we are going to be challenged.”
Temperatures are expected to remain well above 20 degrees in the Prince George area until the end of the Labour Day long weekend.