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Wildfire Today

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128 active wildfires in British Columbia as firefighters from North America and Australia arrive to help

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags , 1 Comment on 128 active wildfires in British Columbia as firefighters from North America and Australia arrive to help

Above: Map showing heat detected by a satellite in southern British Columbia at 2:51 a.m. MDT August 9, 2017.

(Updated at 5 p.m. MDT August 9, 2017)

The wildfire situation in British Columbia has not gotten any better in the last several days. Currently there are 128 active wildfires in the province, with four of them being larger than 50,000 hectares (123,000 acres). The largest, the Hanceville Riske Creek Fire, is getting closer to half a million acres each day.

Since April 1, approximately 591,280 hectares (1,461,082 acres) have burned in 900 fires in BC.

  • Hanceville Riske Creek, 172,000 hectares (425,000 acres) approximately 60 km southwest of Williams Lake.
  • Elephant Hill, 117,000 hectares (289,000 acres), near Ashcroft.
  • Tautri Lake, 76,000 hectares (188,000 acres), 80 km northwest of Williams Lake.
  • Baezaeko River-Quesnel West, 53,000 hectares (131,000 acres).

More than 400 additional firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the US are expected to arrive in BC this week. Other firefighters from Australia have been in the province for a couple of weeks. More than 100 firefighters arrived from Mexico since Saturday of last week. No resources have been ordered or dispatched to Canada through the United States National Interagency Coordination Center, but   the Great Lakes Interstate Forest Fire Compact mobilized a crew to Ontario that is now in British Columbia, and Massachusetts sent personnel across the border. Of course the northwestern one-quarter of the United States is pretty busy with their own fires.

Massachusetts firefighters British Columbia
Firefighters from Massachusetts board an aircraft on the way to the Elephant Hill Fire near Ashcroft, British Columbia. Photo by Mass. Department of Conservation and Recreation.
NSWRFS firefighters British Columbia
On Tuesday U.S. time 40 firefighters from Australia’s New South Wales Rural Fire Service joined 60 others from across the continent as they began their travel to British Columbia. Screenshot from NSWRFS video.

Smoke from wildfires in British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana has created seriously degraded air quality off and on in those areas, at times reaching the “unhealthy” level according to air quality officials.

Air quality southern BC Washington Oregon
Air quality, southern BC, Washington, and Oregon.
Air Quality map
Legend for the above Air Quality map.

Red Flag Warnings, August 8, 2017

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags ,

The National Weather Service has issued Red Flag Warnings or Fire Weather Watches for areas in California, Oregon and Idaho.

The map was current as of 10:35 a.m. MDT on Wednesday. Red Flag Warnings can change throughout the day as the National Weather Service offices around the country update and revise their forecasts.

Where are the unicorns?

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 3 Comments on Where are the unicorns?

It is great that the BLM is using social media for recruiting wildland firefighters Lead Range Techs. But this picture created a smile here.

What are your thoughts about this tweet?

Updated information about the wildfires in Greenland

Author Bill GabbertPosted on Categories UncategorizedTags 1 Comment on Updated information about the wildfires in Greenland

The August 8, 2017 Deimos 2 image above shows one of the two wildfires currently burning in Greenland. When we wrote about the fires on August 7 it was the first time we had covered a fire on the island since we started Wildfire Today in 2008.

After our article was published other organizations also wrote about the fires. Online discussions developed over the last two days have included questions about the fire history of Greenland, and it turns out that no comprehensive reliable data has been unearthed. Researchers looking through satellite data have found historical heat detections by MODIS but many of the individual sensor trips are of low confidence, meaning they could be something other than a wildfire.

It appears that fires have occurred in Greenland, but at very low levels, and sporadically. We are not aware of the reliability of “wildfire CO2 emissions” to indicate the occurrence of wildfires, but the data presented by Mark Parrington (below) looks interesting.

Click once or twice on the images below to see larger versions.