Little snow may bring early start to fire season

The lack of snow this winter could make for a bad start to the forest fire season, but it all depends on what the spring brings, the Department of Natural Resources says.

“In terms of seasonal severity, it’s kind of hard to tell what we’re going to be looking at in July and August, but we have been watching the weather,” said Scott Tingley, the wildfire training officer with the department.

“It certainly looks like we have the potential for an earlier start in terms of the grass fires and things like that this spring because we did have the light snow load,” he said. “It does look like it will be snow-free a little earlier than the last few years, depending on where you’re at.”

He said there is a lot of brown grass, along with fine fuels like pine needles and small branches on the ground that are exposed and relatively dry.

“It just needs some warmer temperatures and a bit of wind, with a drop in humidity, and then they’re ready to burn,” he said. “It would just take a few days of those increased drying conditions and we’d be into grass fires and brush fires starting to pop up.”

He said grass fires can happen at any point of the year. There was a brush fire on the South Shore on Wednesday and a grass fire near Truro on Friday. Grass fires have been reported in highway medians across the province since January.

Tingley said while there hasn’t been a lot of snow, the rain this winter has helped. But it will take a good, normal spring to keep the risk down.

“The spring rains are what determine how severe our spring season is going to be, which is typically our busier period,” he said. “Once things green up through mid-may, the risk inherently goes down as the fuels are green and less available. Then it will just depend on what kind of summer we have.”

He said while 2017 was a better year for precipitation in the province than the previous year, when large fires burned in Annapolis and Shelburne counties, fire losses were basically the same. A total of 728 hectares were lost in 174 fires, compared to 754 hecatres in 274 fires in 2016.

One large fire was on Crown land and wilderness areas in Yarmouth County “so it didn’t get the same profile” as the Seven Mile Lake fire in Annapolis County the year before, even though, at 400 hectares, it burned about the same area.

Wildfire risk season, more commonly known as fire season, starts on March 15. Anyone who plans to have a fire on their property after that day needs to check the online Burnsafe map at www.novascotia.ca/burnsafe/ for daily burning restrictions and information on safe burning.

The online map will be updated every day at 2 p.m. on whether it is legal to burn brush or campfires in each county of the province.

“It does look like it will be snow-free a little earlier than the last few years, depending on where you’re at.”

Scott Tingley, wildfire training officer, Department of Natural Resources