Stormy forecast for parts of BC this weekend is bad news for firefighters
Posted June 22, 2018 4:05 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
KAMLOOPS (NEWS 1130) – With more than 200 wildfires currently burning across the province, firefighters are nervous about thunderstorms igniting even more this weekend.
They’re also hoping the first official weekend of the summer is free of fires sparked by people.
Kevin Skrepnek, the chief information officer with the BC Wildfire Service, says the past few days have already been intense.
“We’ve had tens of thousands of lightning strikes across the province over the past few days, so that has definitely kept our crews busy getting those fires responded to. Thankfully, most of them have been relatively small.”
He adds weekend storms across the some parts of BC are expected to carry gusty winds and more lightning.
“We’re not expecting to see the same level of lightning activity going forward, but certainly some lingering thunderstorms, that’s going to bring gusty wind, lightning and although there’s likely going to be some rain in there, the rain associated with thunderstorms can be quite fickle. You can have a heavy downpour in one area and it will remain dry in another, so we can’t really rely on that across the board to lower the danger.”
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Skrepnek says the forecast is not looking great anywhere in BC.
“We’re not seeing a tremendous amount of reprieve from the weather. We are getting lightning fires really in all six of our regional fire centres, but definitely northern BC and central BC has taken the brunt of it. A lot of the active fires burning right now are in the Prince George fire centre — almost half of them in that northeastern part of the province. Certainly, activity right across the board, that’s going to keep us busy for the foreseeable future, quite frankly.”
There are no immediate plans to implement campfire bans, but Skrepnek is asking anyone heading outdoors to be responsible.
“[We] really want people to be cautious whether that’s with campfires, with off-road vehicles –anything that could spark a fire. The last thing we want to be doing is diverting resources away from the hundreds of fires that we’re already responding to. At times of year like this, when we’re getting hundreds of new fires a day, as a result of lightning, obviously, we can’t do much to prevent those fires, they’re naturally occurring, but the last things we want to be contending with at the same time are preventable, human-caused fires.”
Skrepnek says the only fire to threaten homes this week was the one that forced the temporary evacuation of about a dozen houses in the Batchelor Heights area of Kamloops on Thursday night.
