Luck and preparation are being credited for the relatively quiet wildfire season B.C. has seen to this point in the summer.
That’s what Bowinn Ma, B.C.’s minister of emergency management and climate readiness, told reporters on Wednesday in an update on the province’s wildfire situation.
“One aspect of our position today compared to last year will be a little bit of luck around the weather,” she said.
“That’s something no government so far is going to be able to control. That being said, we learned a lot of lessons from the 2023 wildfire season.”
Ma said 18 B.C. properties are presently under evacuation order due to wildfire, with an estimated 1,600 on alert. Compare that to last year at this time, when an estimated 35,000 people were forced from their homes due to wildfires raging across the province, many of them in the Central Okanagan and Shuswap areas.
“The weather has certainly played a role in reducing wildfire threat to communities, as has the extraordinary work and dedication of the BC Wildfire Service firefighters over the past several weeks, and really throughout the entire year,” Ma said.
“They have done an incredible job managing the wildfire situation here in British Columbia. With our vast forests and prolonged drought, they have had a challenging job and they continue to rise to the occasion.”
Ma also credited the work of a task force struck following last summer’s wildfire season by Premier David Eby.
“The task force went around the province, collected information and, as they were identifying opportunities for improvement, they were actually feeding that information and those recommendations back to ministries in real time so that we could get that work underway,” she said.
“Examples of those recommendations were around enhancing wildfire fighting training and recruitment techniques, emphasizing a greater focus on incorporating local knowledge and traditional Indigenous knowledge into the work we’re doing, boosting access to firefighting equipment and aircraft, utilizing new artificial intelligence technology to help improve wildfire predictions and also emphasizing the need for greater capacity within our own wildfire service.”
Ma also cited the creation of a new wildfire centre at Thompson Rivers University, which was also part of Eby's task force announcement. To this point, little is known publicly about the centre and how it will operate.
The latest bulletin from the BC Wildfire Service on Wednesday said the forecast for most of the province is calling for cloudy skies with seasonal temperatures and light winds.
Areas in southern B.C. will see some rain, which will be heavier along the coast, with a chance of lightning in the southeast and on southern Vancouver Island.
A warming and drying trend is returning to the north, where bulletins about smoky skies have been issued for the Peace, Williston and Stuart-Nechako regions.
