Kamloops firefighters urging vigilance as preparations underway for potential new fire starts

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“Ideally, its one ignition at a time,” Cail added. “We can manage that no problem. Where we’ll get challenged is if we have multiple ignitions at once at its stretching resources. At that time, that’s when we would make some phone calls to our partnering agencies.”

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That partnership was on full display at a human-caused landscape fire along Shuswap Road earlier this month. KFR is urging vigilance in the hopes of limiting human-caused fires, freeing up resources to respond to any lightning-caused fires.

“Accidental or intentional human caused fires – we want to try and reduce those for sure because all that does is stretches us short,” Cail added. “When we have weather events like this and Mother Nature comes in and brings in lighting and wind events, we need to have available resources to focus on those events.”

In the past, the city pre-emptively closed parks and nature trails during times of high fire danger or extreme drought conditions. That isn’t the case any longer, unless there is an interface fire or if a wildfire is approaching the city.

“We went away from that because of the ability to have eyes out there watching for us,” Cail said. “If we have folks that are still out and they’re being mindful and respectful of the conditions, if they do notice smoke, they can report it right away which gets us out the door really quick and gets us on site and gives us an effective opportunity to put the fire out early.”

Kamloops Fire Rescue has 22 personnel on shift at any given time. And Cail said if they get stretched too thin because of multiple calls at once, they’ll put the call out to off-duty personnel and adjust their response accordingly.

“Please be careful while you’re out there,” Cail said. “If we do have some ignitions, please be mindful of the crews working on site and give us lots of space. It’s turning into a regular thing this time of year again but it’s no surprise to anybody around here.”

“We used to call it summer, now we call it fire season.”