By Ed White
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) -Canada’s second-worst wildfire season on record has already burned 7.8 million hectares and could continue for weeks, federal government officials said Monday.
Warmer than usual weather forecast from now until the end of September for southern British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan creates a significant risk of new fires, since those areas remain very dry, they said.
Present fires have a “high likelihood” of being able to continue burning or smoldering “well into autumn” because of the higher-than-usual temperatures forecast, said Julienne Morissette of Natural Resources Canada.
Fires have also affected Atlantic provinces Newfoundland and Nova Scotia this year, due to unusual dryness. More than 60% of Canada’s burned areas have been in the western provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, however.
Since 2023 more than 25 million hectares of Canadian land have been burned by wildfires, causing massive smoke plumes to flow across Canada and well south into much of the United States.
Some local U.S. politicians have complained about the smoke from Canada ruining summer activities and vacations.
Canada’s wildfire seasons have caused mass evacuations in a number of parts of northern Canada, where many Indigenous people live. About 13,000 people from First Nations are still evacuated.
During the peak of the evacuations in early summer, military aircraft helped bring people from isolated forest communities to emergency shelters, including hotel rooms thousands of kilometres away in Niagara Falls, Ont.
Some communities require repair work to infrastructure and homes after fire and smoke inundated hard-to-reach areas, making it hard for some evacuees to return even after the fire risks subside, officials said.
Federal officials said climate change had worsened the wildfire risk across Canada. Warmer average temperatures and longer snow-free seasons mean there is more potential for fires than in the past.
“Increasingly fires are an all-year event, and as Canadians we need to be fire-smart all year,” said Corey Hogan, parliamentary secretary to the minister of energy and natural resources.
(Reporting by Ed White. Editing by Mark Potter)
