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Canada's record-breaking wildfire season has now seen 100,000 square kilometres of land scorched as blazes continue to burn out of control across the entire country.
The total area burned is roughly the size of Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Michigan combined.
"There are some very, very large fires still burning and a number of them are out of control so that number is going to continue to rise," Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair said in an interview Thursday of the vast amount of land that's burned.
Canada surpassed the record set in 1989 for total area burned in one season on June 27 when the figure totalled 76,000 square kilometres, and communities have faced evacuation orders, heat warnings and poor air quality for months.
The majority of blazes are now in Western Canada, and British Columbia has the greatest number, with more than 370 of the country's 878 active fires, Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre data shows.
More than half of those fires were burning out of control as of Sunday afternoon.
The Northwest Territories reported Sunday that a firefighter died from an injury sustained while battling a fire near his home community of Fort Liard the day before. No other information will be released until his family has been notified.
He was the second firefighter to die in under a week, after 19-year-old Devyn Gale was killed by a falling tree Thursday near Revelstoke, B.C.
Based on forecasted conditions, Natural Resources Canada expects the wildfire season will continue to be unusually intense throughout July and into August.
As of Saturday's national fire situation report, Quebec has seen the largest area of scorched earth this season, with 43,145 square kilometres burned — an area slightly larger than Vancouver Island and slightly smaller than Nova Scotia.
The good news, Blair said, is that conditions are expected to improve significantly in Eastern Canada if the seven-day weather forecast holds true.
"The situation is far less dire than it had been even a week and a half ago," the minister said, though he acknowledged that very serious out-of-control fires continue to burn on the East Coast, and in Ontario and Quebec.
The government has yet to tally the costs associated with the wildfires, but Blair said they are expected to be considerable given how far the fires have spread, and how long and intensely they've been burning.
The other silver lining is that, so far, flames haven't compromised critical infrastructure in communities the way they did in Fort McMurray in 2016, when fire destroyed thousands of homes and buildings, he said.
"We have not seen that type of damage as a result of these fires," he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 16, 2023.
— With files from Mia Rabson
Comments
The extent of these fires should help us make more accurate connections between global warming and extreme weather..........the disasters that a warming climate brings with it are exponential in nature....and everything exponential in nature moves toward something we might call uncontrollability.
For a culture that loves to imagine it controls everything...or is soon to do so with its bigger and better machines.......like smart phones and artificial intelligence what?....this is a hard truth to grasp.
But it is the truth we need to acknowledge. Positive feedback loops in climate science are not like positive thinking. Intelligence Alert!!! Positive feedback looks make a bad situation very much worse. That's exactly what the changing climate is doing for Fire......as droughts increase, and flash floods (not good for clear cut slopes children) wash away needed soil......trees become stressed, dry, and tinder ready for that lightning spark.......or off road vehicle spark, and voila!!!
Uncontollable beasts burning through more trees than even Justin could plant in a decade.
We imagine little children doing good planting saplings here there and everywhere...........but turn a blind eye to what's happening to the lungs of the north. We still think if no human infrastructure is damaged we're good to go.........smokey skies scare us for a week, and then we go Stampeding in them, oblivous to what our little ones are breathing.
When more of them die from what that smoke does to little lungs it will be too late. But for now, we're also oblivious to the three barrels of drinkable water we poison for every barrel of bitumen we pull up from deep earth in Alberta.
Slow learners? Or too busy fighting trivial battles with our fellow victims, while the world burns?
Who was it said 'Fire Next Time'? A book by James Baldwin was it not???