The number of hectares burned so far this fire season is about 42 times higher than the 20 year average for this time of year.
“Since April 1st, 2023, 433 wildfires have burned a total of 762-thousand hectares,” said Minister of Forests Bruce Ralston.
“The 20-year average for this time of year is 306 wildfires and 18-thousand hectares. The vast majority of these hectares have burned within the Northeast region of the province, where we continue to respond to our largest incidents.”
Ralston assured the province would not run out of fire fighters.
“There are a number of arrangements both at the national level and internationally to provide mutual assistance,” he said.
“When British Columbia needs support, we know we can count on it.”
BC Wildfire Service Wildfire Operations Director Cliff Chapman added the request for support has gone international as many provinces are dealing with wildfires.
“We have had supports come into Canada from Australia, from Mexico, the European Union,” Chapman said.
“At this time in BC, we have enough resource capacity to manage the fires that are on the landscape, as well as be prepared for potential new ignitions from lightning caused fires.”
Chapman said they’ve requested an incident management team from the States to support the BCWS.
“We’ll put them onto one of our priority fires, and it will give us the ability to rest one of our own incident management teams,” he explained.
“Our incident management teams are all going on their second or third tour of duty already this year, which is abnormal relative to many years in the past 20 years, where generally we may not see our incident management teams deploy until July and August.”
Chapman said they’ve also put in requests (that can be cancelled at any time) for the next two weeks for additional firefighting capacity.
Chapman added we need sustained rainfall throughout the summer.
“We have not seen sustained rainfall in this province really since we went snow-free,” Chapman said.
“We’ve seen dribs and drabs and we’ve certainly have seen some localized downpours, but with the conditions, with the over-winter drought, coming out of the winter with drought, breaking temperature records in late-April-early-May, doing it again in June, we’re in a tricky spot.”
As of this morning (10:27), the Donnie Creek Wildfire remains an estimated 487,509 hectares in size, while the West Kiskatinaw River Wildfire has grown to 25,095 hectares, and the Peavine Creek Wildfire has grown to 4,141 hectares.