The Provincial government is doing their reviews on how this past fire season went.
Forestry and Parks Minister Todd Loewen says that while the number of fires was similar to what they’ve averaged in recent years, the difference this year was how much area was burned.
“2.2 million hectares this fire season, which is about 10 times the average. We had about 38,000 people evacuated from about 48 different communities. The average size of fires was a lot bigger that normal and that’s where we got the amount of area burned in comparison to past years.”
As part of their review process, Loewen says there’s a couple of things that they’ve already identified.
“We want to be prepared earlier. We’re always prepared early in the season to catch early fires, but the volume of fires that came early on this season has caused us to want to have things prepared a little bit earlier. We want to be able to utilize volunteers more. There’s a lot of people that wanted to help out and we just want to make sure that we could use volunteers and make sure that they’re safe as they help out.”
Loewen adds that they’re looking to enhance current and identify new technologies or techniques that can be used for dealing with fires.
You can listen to the full interview below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
