Military on alert as wildfires rage amid heatwave
The Canadian military was on standby on Saturday to help evacuate towns and fight more than 170 wildfires fueled by a record-smashing heat wave and tinder-dry conditions as the government in Ottawa warned of a “long and challenging summer” ahead.
At least 174 fires were active in the western province of British Columbia, 78 of them sparked in the last two days, officials said. Most were caused by intense lightning storms.
The fires were north of the city of Kamloops, 350 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
“We saw 12,000 lightning strikes, roughly, yesterday,” said Cliff Chapman, the director of provincial operations for British Columbia Wildfire Service, according to public broadcaster the CBC.
“Many of those lightning strikes were hitting near communities, [as] was seen in the Kamloops area.”
While the immediate blame for the scorching heat has been placed on a high-pressure “heat dome” trapping warm air in the region, climate change is making record-setting temperatures more frequent.
Globally, the decade to 2019 was the hottest recorded, and the five hottest years on record have all occurred since 2012, according to climate.gov.
“The dry conditions and the extreme heat in British Columbia are unprecedented,” Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said on Friday. “These wildfires show that we are in the earliest stages of what promises to be a long and challenging summer.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met on Friday with an incident response group that included several ministers, after earlier speaking with local, provincial and indigenous leaders.
“We will be there to help,” he told reporters.
The response group said it would establish an operations centre in Edmonton, with up to 350 military personnel providing logistical support to the region, according to Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. Military aircraft are also being deployed.
Roughly 1,000 people have fled the wildfires in British Columbia, with many others still missing.
The British Columbia medical examiner’s office said there had been 719 deaths in the past week, “three times more” than the average number recorded over the period.
Lisa Lapointe, the province’s chief coroner, said the extreme weather was likely “a significant contributing factor”.
The village of Lytton, 250km northeast of Vancouver, was evacuated on Wednesday after a fire flared up and spread quickly. Nearly 90% of the village was torched, according to Brad Vis, an MP for the area.
“We really just had to get out there and we had no choice,” resident Gordon Murray told CBC.
“We grabbed the pets that we could find. We had to leave one behind. We grabbed our wallets and got in the car. We didn’t have time for anything else.”
On Tuesday, the village set a Canadian record of 49.6 degrees Celsius.
The heat wave continued to spread across central Canada on Saturday, also affecting the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as well as parts of the Northwest Territories and northern Ontario.
“A dangerous long-duration heat wave will continue,” bringing “very warm temperatures over the next couple of days”, Environment Canada warned in bulletins for British Columbia.
British Columbia also warned of flooding from melting mountain snowcaps and glaciers.
Further south, the US states of Washington and Oregon have also suffered record temperatures.