157 wildfires are burning across the province including 30 new blazes which started Thursday.
“Yesterday was one of our busiest fire days in a number of weeks now. Many of those fires yesterday, of those 30 were lightning caused. Almost all of them in the Kamloops and South East Fire Centres” says Chief Fire Information Officer Kevin Skrepnek.
“Thankfully with the exception for one fire near the Joe Rich area (east of Kelowna) most of those fires were contained at a very small size and haven’t materialized to anything of concern.”
Since April 1st, BC Wildfire Service has responded to 1,109 fires across the province which have burned an estimated 1,027,356 hectares and costing an estimated $384.3 million dollars to date.
Cooler weather with precipitation which gave some wildfires including the Elephant Hill a reprieve yesterday will be short lived according to Skrepnek.
“In Kamloops today, it was about 7 degrees this morning. It felt and looked very much like a fall day. We are expecting though into the weekend, things are going to get a little warmer, a little drier,” he says.
“High 20s in central B.C and low 30s in southern British Columbia, so definitely a return to some of those seasonal August temperatures and that is going to have potential for drying out the fuels there even more.”
Skrepnek notes that there still no major rain event in the forecast to put a dent in the wildfires in southern BC, to really ‘calm down the situation.’