Welcome to warm weather and wildfire season.
The 2021 season officially opened on April 1st and the province has already had an evacuation alert placed and lifted near Merritt. The 2020 season was quiet according to BC Wildfire service with 637, and 2019 wasn't too bad either.
But nothing compares to the seasons in 2017 and 2018 - the worst wildfire seasons in BC history hit back to back.
The 2017 season started slow. Dale Bojahara, a wildfire officer with the Vernon Fire Zone, "In 2017 we started off with a fairly heavy flood season, our season started expecially early. Our crews, both the local crews from the Okanagan and even regionally, many crews came through the Okanagan to assist with the flood effort that was ongoing with Okanagan Lake being at record levels at that time."
A single lightning storm lit more than 100 fires and burnt nearly 7,000 hectares in a single day on July 7th. On that day a provincial state of emergency was declared that would remain for 10 weeks - the longest state of emergency the province has seen next to the current pandemic.
That year, over 1.2 million hectares burned and the cost exceeded $649 million.
2018 may have cost less, but a whole lot more was scorched. More than two thousand fires burned 1.35 million hectares of land.
Bojahara recalls one of his scariest moments, "After finishing a shift and coming back into the Okanagan Valley and actually seeing truly for the first time all the various columns of smoke from the number of fires, because my Kamloops shift happened to start at the beginning of that lightning storm. That was my first chance to actually see it firsthand beyond at our regional operation centres looking at photos and that sort of thing."
Jim Mandeville is a Senior Project Manager with First OnSite. He says there was a bit of deja vu in 2018, helping out a lot of the same businesses from the previous year. "2018 seemed to be a bit more intense, where because of the knowledge and the learnings of the previous year there was a lot more businesses being more proactive in requesting assistance. Sort of everybody came out right at once at the beginning and said 'Hey you know, there's smoke coming into town and we really need help with this or with that.' So, we certainly saw some learnings, especially in the smaller communities in the Interior."
Smoke was so bad, Central and South Okanagan each spent 18 days with the air quality posing a high health risk. Of the 2,117 fires in 2018, a quarter of them were human caused, 70 percent due to lightning, and each fire burned an average of 639 hectares.
BC fires in 2018 accounted for about 60 percent of total land burned across Canada for the year.
Bojahara says the fight wouldn't have been possible without outside supports, "I think it's important to, when we look back at 2017 and 2018, recognize all the partners from across Canada and even internationally that we were able to access and gain assistance from. Those strong partnerships are what allow us to get through a heavy season like that."