More than 100 Mexican firefighters arriving to assist in fighting Pear Lake Wildfire

More help is arriving today (August 4) to action the Pear Lake wildfire in the South Cariboo.

Fire Information Officer at the Big Bar Complex Karley Desrosiers said they have upwards of 50 pieces of heavy equipment, several water tenders and around 500 wildland and structural firefighters from across the Province and Alberta.

“Today (August 4) we will have over 100 Mexican firefighters arriving to the complex as well and they will be distributed and assigned to different objectives across the fire. We have over 600 people, nearing 600 firefighters and then all the support staff that does come with that. We have a massive group here, we are located currently at the Hat Creek Ranch. Everyone is staged here and they are distributed pretty evenly across our priority areas.”

Desrosiers noted the priority areas continue to be the Village of Clinton, communities to the North so Chasm, 70 Mile, over to the West towards Big Bar Lake and Meadow Lake, down in the South Pavillion and all the structures in and about the area.

“That does remain our top priority is structure protection, structure defense. There is still a lot of fire on the landscape and with the increasing temperatures through the week we are going to see fire behavior pick up but we still have a lot of people engaged and good work being done to make sure that we continue to protect life and property which is our number one priority.”

Desrosiers said fortunately they didn’t see the cold front over the weekend impact the fire as significantly as we thought it could.

“Fire behavior remains active and continues to do so but not the extent that we expected for the weekend. Following that cold front we saw cooler temperatures, higher humidity and less wind so that was more advantageous for fire behavior over the weekend as well so we saw relative to the conditions we experienced early on when these fires started. We saw less fire behavior through the weekend but the fire does remain active on several of those flanks.”