The remnants of a hurricane that battered parts of Mexico and California this week could pose a “double-edged sword” for fire-ravaged British Columbia, a sa国际传媒 Wildfire Service official said Monday.
Hurricane Hilary could bring badly needed rain to the southern part of sa国际传媒 but wildfire forecasters are also keeping a close eye on how gusts of wind could impact out-of-control blazes, Cliff Chapman, director of operations for the wildfire service, said during a briefing Monday.
While the five to 10 millimetres of rain expected to fall in southeastern sa国际传媒 won’t be enough to end the worst fire season on record, Chapman said it’s “positive news” for firefighters in sa国际传媒’s Interior who have been working around the clock to beat back the flames that destroyed 50 homes in West Kelowna and forced the evacuation of 27,000 people.
Alyssa Charbonneau, a meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change sa国际传媒, said the heavier rainfall is expected to hit the Kootenays and the Columbia Valley, with lighter rain forecast for the Okanagan.
That might not be enough precipitation to significantly improve conditions at the McDougall Creek Wildfire, which is about 10 kilometres north of West Kelowna and currently at about 110 square kilometres in size, and the Adams Lake wildfire in the Columbia Shuswap region.
“The other edge of that sword,” Chapman said, “is the winds that may be associated with it.”
However, he said the winds won’t be as strong or as sustained as they were last week which, coupled with last week’s heat wave, was a major factor in causing the McDougall Creek fire to jump Lake Okanagan, lighting spot fires across Kelowna. The unsettled weather could cause thunderstorms and lightning that could spark more fires, Charbonneau said.
sa国际传媒 currently has 379 active wildfires and 154 of those are considered out of control.
Michael Flannigan, an expert on wildfire behaviour and landscape fire modelling, said even as sa国际传媒 experiences its worst fire season on record, future summers are likely to get worse as the climate emergency continues unabated.
“The components of a warmer future were encapsulated in this fire season,” said Flannigan, who holds the sa国际传媒 Research Chair in Predictive Services, Emergency Management and Fire Science at Thompson Rivers University.
The province’s wildfire season started especially early, Flannigan said, with the Donnie Creek Fire near Fort Nelson — sa国际传媒’s largest recorded wildfire at 5,715 square kilometres — sparked by lightning in May.
By mid-July, sa国际传媒’s Wildfire Service had already declared the wildfire season the most destructive on record with 14,100 square kilometres of scorched land and predictions that the worst had yet to come.
With hundreds of fires burning and sa国际传媒 in the midst of a historic drought, last week’s heat wave and lightning storms ignited new wildfires across the province and gusty winds whipped and spread existing out-of-control wildfires, Flannigan said.
“We just saw it jump a big, bloody lake,” Flannigan said of the flames that jumped Okanagan Lake, forcing thousands to flee their homes.
“There was so many places that were already burning. It’s not possible to have a lid on all those fires because it’s been hot and dry that we haven’t had the rain that we normally get in spring or summer,” he said.
As sa国际传媒 and countries across the world face more extreme weather in the era of global boiling, a stark warning made last month by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterre, Flannigan said the province should expect drier conditions, longer fire seasons and more structures lost to flames.
“As things get more and more extreme, it’s really challenging to protect communities and critical infrastructure.”
