As British Columbians head into the long weekend, they’ll be contending with a growing risk of new wildfires.
Heat warnings are in place for much of the B.C. Interior for the next several days with forecast temperatures as high as 38 C, and while temperatures aren’t as hot on the South Coast, conditions are increasingly dry.
It’s a recipe for a potential surge in new fires, after a wildfire season that has been milder than average for about three-quarters of the province, the BC Wildfire Service said Tuesday.
“This heat we are experiencing over the next few days is going to challenge our suppression efforts because the condition of the fuel, there is still underlying drought,” director of wildfire operations Cliff Chapman said.
“We are going to be challenged in an initial attack over the next 72 hours, but I feel confident that we have resources positioned across B.C., initial attack, helicopters, our air tanker fleet … we have the resources to respond to it.”
Chapman said the good news is that the hot stretch is coming at the end of July, rather than in May or June, and that shorter days and higher humidity should help crews in the weeks to come.
So far, there have been 623 wildfires in B.C. this year, compared with 1,059 at this point last summer and 1,522 at this point in 2023.
A whopping 98.5 per cent of the fires have been in the Prince George Fire Centre, most of them in the province’s northeast.
“It has been significant, it is a lot of hectares, and there has been a lot of fire on the landscape up there,” Chapman said. “Saying that, they also received significant precipitation in the last couple of weeks.”
Crews have been able to contain a majority of the fires throughout the province before they grew beyond four hectares in size, Forests Minister Ravi Parmar said.
“While many parts of B.C. have been fortunate so far with fewer fires and less devastation, we know this can change in an instant,” he said, urging the public not to let their guard down, particularly heading into a long weekend.
With fewer fires to contend with, Parmar said B.C. had been loaning crews and resources to other provinces and territories to help with their wildfire fights.
A campfire ban remains in effect for areas including Vancouver Island, the Lower Mainland and the Sea-to-Sky region, but campfires remain permitted in the Interior.
Much of British Columbia remains abnormally dry, with severe drought in the Similkameen and Slocan-Lower Columbia basins.
“Low river flows are already putting fish and aquatic ecosystems at risk, and we’ve been seeing some fish stranding on Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland as well,” said Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship Minister Randene Neill.
“Some rivers … in the Interior have improved, but those gains as of yesterday were all lost, and we’re at critical low periods again.”
With hotter weather on the way, the province is also urging people to do whatever they can to conserve water.