The Province spent about $148 million less fighting wildfires this year than in 2015, thanks a lot to wet weather.
Local Fire Officer Amanda Reynolds calculates BC spent $119 million fighting blazes this summer. While she didn’t have an exact number for each of the six fire centres, she says a lot of that money helped fight 243 fires in our region. That’s a big decrease in both Provincial dollars spent ($267 million across BC in 2015) and total fires in our region (339 last year).
In this case, fewer fires also mean less damage. The Prince George Fire Centre lost 91,000 hectares of forests in this year’s blazes, compared to last year’s astounding 210,000 ha.
This year’s fire season got off to an early start, about 3 weeks earlier than usual. However, the Reynolds says the wet summer had a large part in managing fires.
“The weather really plays a role in wildfire and with the heavy precipitation that we had in June and the weather systems that came through the summer definitely didn’t have long periods of dying.”
Even though the number of fires in our region fell, the number of human-caused blazes went up to 147 from 102 last year. There were 93 lightning-started fires this year compared to 237 last year.