Canada’s fire season ranks among worst yet less severe than feared

As summer draws to a close in Canada, the 2024 wildfire season is shaping up to be one of the most destructive on record, largely due to the devastation caused by a wildfire that ravaged a tourist town in the Canadian Rockies.

Based on total area burned, the season ranks among the top six in the last half century. Even so, 2024 is turning out to be far less severe than last year – the worst on record – and not as bad as many feared.

The total cost of damage from this year’s wildfires rose in July when a third of the popular tourist town of Jasper, Alberta, was destroyed by fire. The fire caused an estimated C$880 million ($646.73 million) in insured damages, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

A total of 5.3 million hectares (13.1 million acres) have burned so far in 2024, according to the Canadian Interagency Center for Forest Fires, and more than 600 fires continue to rage across the country, mainly in Colombia British.

That makes 2024 the worst season since 1995, with the exception of last year, when a record 17 million hectares burned and released more carbon than some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters.

Canada’s wildfire season typically runs from April, when the snow melts, to September or October, with activity peaking in July and August. Climate scientists say average temperatures will rise in Canada as the world warms, leading to longer and more destructive wildfire seasons.

In April, the Canadian government warned that 2024 could be another “catastrophic” fire season due to ongoing drought in western provinces and forecasts for a warmer-than-average summer.

“We’re preparing for what could have been as bad a year as 2023,” said Alberta Wildfire information manager Christie Tucker, adding that the province has added a third night-vision helicopter, hired a hundred more firefighters and declared an earlier start. 2024 season as a precaution.

But dry conditions in June and July and an unusually high number of lightning-started fires sparked hundreds more fires across the province, including the one that hit Jasper.

“This has had a significant impact on everyone in Alberta,” Tucker added.

The threat of nearby fires prompted Suncor EnergySU.TO, Canada’s second-largest oil company, to cut production at its Firebag site in northern Alberta, but the impact on oil supplies was much smaller than in some previous summers.

“Zombie” fires.

Fire agencies also had to contend with dozens of so-called zombie fires that ignited last summer and burned throughout the Canadian winter.

The fires of 2023, smoldering under the snow, reveal Canada’s dangerous new reality

“I’ve never seen a year like this where there was so much fire because of a previous year. Some of them were the size of Prince Edward Island, they were just huge,” said Mike Flannigan, a fire expert and research chair at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia.

Prince Edward Island, one of Canada’s maritime provinces, covers an area of ​​566,000 hectares, roughly the same size as the Toronto metropolitan area.

Flannigan estimated that nearly half a million hectares, or nearly 10%, of land burned in Canada in 2024 was due to winter fires in 2023.

Fewer evacuation orders and less widespread smoke — which last year affected millions of people in the northeastern United States as well as Canada — contributed to the perception that 2024 was a milder year for wildfires.

Kira Hoffman, a postdoctoral researcher and wildfire ecologist at the University of British Columbia, said western Canada was helped by a period of cooler weather in late August that dampened some of the fire activity, but, in terms of historically speaking, 2024 was another very destructive season.

“It’s that basic shifting syndrome. Last year was so bad that this year we think only a third of that burn is good enough,” she added. “But there’s nothing normal about it.”

Many experts warn that the trend of longer periods of very hot and dry “fire weather” and increasingly unfavorable fire seasons will continue as a result of climate change.

“If you look at either the total area burned or the number of fires from year to year or the total wildfire damage, it goes up and down, but you draw the average trend line and everything goes up,” Ryan said Ness, director of adaptation. at the Canadian Climate Institute.

($1 = 1.3607 Canadian dollars)

(Reporting by Nia Williams in Revelstoke, British Columbia; Editing by Frank McGurty and Marguerita Choy)

Photo: A worker walks through a devastated neighborhood in western Jasper, Alberta, Monday, Aug. 19, 2024, after a fire caused evacuations and widespread damage in the National Park and the town of Jasper. (Amber Bracken/The Canadian Press via AP)

Related:

TOPICS
Catastrophe Natural Disasters Fire in Canada