Two record breaking wildfire seasons followed by two much quieter seasons.
More than one month into the 2021 fire season - how are things looking so far?
Nicole Bonnett, a fire information officer with the Kamloops Fire Centre says it started a little dry, but recent rains have helped. "The activity that we have seen over the last month now isn't unusual. All the snow melts off and it brings to surface all that dead vegetation, everything that's dried up, all the grasses and things that died over the winter, and then when that snow disappears and the sun comes out a little bit all that moisture leaves that vegetation and it dries up quite quickly."
All that dead vegetation acts a fuel and we've seen several fires already. Wildland Fire Ecologist Robert Gray commented on the year so far, "There was a larger fire in Merritt, couple hundred hectares in size, and there were some fires here and there. It's not unusual when we start to dry out in April that we get some grass fires and that's a lot of what's happened."
But Gray says they've been able to do a lot of prescribed burns so far this year. "I know in the Okanagan they carried out some, they carried out some in East Kootenay trench, I think they got some done up in the Caribou as well. There's a window there when the grass is dried and we get some favourable weather and we can actually carry out some burns. If we're in prescription to carry out burns we're also likely to see some human caused fires, we don't typically have lightning fires this time of year."
Ultimately, Gray says a wildfire season is nearly impossible to predict. It's really up to mother nature. "Snowpack used to be a good predictor, but it's no longer that way. 2017 and 2018 we had a normal snowpack and it disappear so fast in April and May that we had an early fire season in 2017. The crazy thing with 2018 is that it didn't look like it was going to be much of a fire season at all and then it dried out rapidly in July and there was about a three week fire season."
Wildfires are inevitable. So what should you do if one creeps in on your community?
Parliamentary Secretary for Emergency Preparedness Jennifer Rice says first off stay calm, and then look to local officials and your local Emergency Support Services.
Rice says the service is available in every BC municipality. "For up to 72 hours we can provide shelter if you've had to be evacuated, we can provide meal vouchers, and it's basically just enough to get people on their feet, to get their insurance papers in order, or to tie up any loose ends that they need to tie up in order to get back on their feet."