147 lightning strikes and more expected in the Kamloops Fire Centre

A storm rolling through the Kamloops Fire Centre between Sunday night and Monday morning offered 147 lightning strikes, sparking several fires.

“We are currently flying (over) a lot of those fires to get proper tracks on them and to start to respond,” Taylor Shantz, Information Officer with the BC Wildfire Centre said Monday.

Some of the fires sparked in the North Okanagan Shuswap area have already garnered a response from fire crews, though its the days ahead where the full situation should be known.

“The forecast for (Monday) is looking like a bit of the same again,  potentially some sporadic lightning throughout the Vernon area heading into this evening and again those warming trends heading into tomorrow,” she said.

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Lightning, she said, arrived with a little bit of precipitation, which tends to knock down the fire behaviour.

3:08 Cooler weather offer respite in B.C. wildfire fight

“As we warm up in the afternoon, we will start to see those columns stand up and fires will be a little bit more visible,” she said.

Currently, there are four wildfires of note in the Kamloops Fire Centre. A wildfire of note is considered an especially visible or threatening fire and Shantz said overall crews are making good progress on all.

The forecast in the days ahead is a bit cooler than was previously seen in the area and that may help the firefight, though conditions are far from ideal.

“I think, unfortunately, because of the back-to-back years of drought with the current warming trend is enough to see pretty easy ignition,” Shantz said.

“So of course we encourage the public to exercise caution when recreating the backcountry and to use our BC wildfire app to record any wildfires that they do see.”

The app allows people to include photos which is helpful to BC Wildfire’s operations team in deploying resources.