Lightning strikes mean a busy weekend for firefighters
Posted August 3, 2013 8:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Lightning strikes have sparked about 200 new wildfires across BC in the last couple of days.
Most of the fires have been very small. Firefighters have been helped by cooler and wetter conditions that arrived with the same storm system that brought the lightning.
But even though the storm is over, it’s expected to cause problems for weeks and months to come.
“Often with lightning fires, they’ll burn deep in the ground,” explains Michaela Swan, a fire information officer with the BC’s Wildfire Management Branch. “And then, as conditions change, or the little bit of precipitation dries up, warmer temperatures, those fires will ignite.”
The weather across southern BC is expected to return to sunny and dry conditions.
Meantime, crews are attacking the new lightning-sparked fires that are visible.
“The majority of these fires have been contained at less-than a hectare in size,” says Swan. “Many of them are spot-sized, burning single trees with minimal spread around the area.”
She says most of the fires can be handled by initial attack crews. “That’s a three-person IA crew. As well, sometimes we’re also using our air tanker fleet.”
“They’ll lay retardant to slow the spread of that wildfire and to allow us time to get those initial attack crews in place to extinguish those fires,” she adds.
