Excellent progress was made on the massive Plateau wildfire over the weekend, so much that Nazko and Kluskus residents were finally able to go home after six weeks.
Claire Allen, a Fire Information Officer at the Cariboo Fire Centre in Williams Lake, says they were able to fully scan the containment lines in and around those communities…
“Generally what we’re seeing across the fire is a phase of mop up and patrol, that is where we seek and destroy those hot spots and extinguish them as well as do the danger tree accessing, so it is a very large area of land so there is quite a bit of work to be done.”
She says there hasn’t been any growth over the past few days thanks to the hard work by crews and a big assist from mother nature.
But Allen says there are still hot spots burning deep beneath the ground in some areas…
“There is a lot of fire behavior that doesn’t look apparent when you are seeing no smoke coming up but is burning very, very deep underground so our crews right now are working to identify where those are to extinguish them as well as assessing for danger trees in the area. Given that the fire was burning underground, a lot of root systems are compromised so there are a lot of hazardous trees left in the area.”
The Plateau fire, the largest in BC’s history, remains at 521, 648 hectares.