Cooler weekend temperatures not the end of fire season

“Right now, we’re sitting at about 52,000 hectares burnt,” BCWS fire information officer Mikhail Elsay said. “So a significantly smaller hectarage, but almost the exact same numbers of fires. We’ve had 361 fires this year versus 365 fires last year.”

According to the Kamloops Fire Centre, the number of crews and aviation units responding to fires this year is similar to 2023.

“It’s almost all weather driven,” Elsay said. “We’ve responded to incidents the exact same way this year as we have last year. The biggest influence has been that the cold fronts with the wind that have come this year came with rain last year. The dry, cold front that showed up on August 17th and 18th didn’t come with rain. And so that’s why we saw such aggressive fire behavior last year versus this year.”

Heavy rain and cooler temperatures over the last few days have reduced some of the fire behavior in the area.

However, Environment Canada notes cooler, wetter conditions are not expected to linger.

“We’re looking forward to a stretch of warmer, drier conditions,” Environment Canada meteorologist Chris Doyle. “No precipitation is expected at that time. The landscape is going to dry out.”

Doyle says late August is usually a dry season for the southern Interior and he expects relatively average conditions going into the long weekend.

“We just want to remind people that even though we received a bunch of rain and there has been a downturn, we still have all of September to go where we see warm, dry conditions,” said Elsay.

“We still want to remind people to be vigilant, it isn’t the end of fire season. This is just sort of a downturn in the weather for us.”

by Sydney Chisholm

Cooler weekend temperatures not the end of fire season

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