10 million hectares have burned in Canada, with 571 fires out of control

In Quebec, more than 1.5 million hectares of taiga continue to burn. About 1,300 kilometers north of Montreal, a record-breaking fire is raging under cloudless but smoky skies, devouring dry moss. The fire is a significant part of the 9.9 million hectares of forest and grasslands that have already been reduced to ashes in Canada. Since the beginning of the year, the flames have burned an area the size of Portugal. On Thursday, July 13, a firefighter died during an intervention in the west of the country.

This fire season, “Worst Ever Recorded”, According to the Canadian government, is halfway there. The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC)It coordinates firefighter activity nationally, and of the 3,989 fires identified since January, 901 are still active. “This is still less than in 1989, a landmark year with 12,204 fires., CIFFC’s Communications Officer Marieke de Roos comments. But the fire of 2023 burns big places. » This trend, which has been reported for the last four decades, has been confirmed across the country Through a survey du Center: The number of forest fires is decreasing, but their intensity is increasing.

Alberta’s Great Plains in the country’s midwest are used to fires, but the flames have already affected eight times the five-year average of hectares. Firefighters are on alert, especially if the June rains douse the bulk of the fire after May. “We’ve had several weeks of extreme heat and the Northwest is already warming up.”, warns Josie St-Onge, spokeswoman for the Alberta Agency for Wildfire Management. The same is true for Alaska’s neighboring Canadian territory, the Yukon, which has been relatively spared volcanoes until now.

Quebec is burning more than usual and 1,044 firefighters are battling fires closer to municipalities than ever before. The proliferation of fires is encouraging them to focus on the most spectacular fires: On the Alberta side, about 2,100 firefighters are putting water on just five fires. It is enough to leave the forests ten thousand kilometers further north to catch fire. “The priority is to put out fires near communities and businesses.”Press M^me Saint-Onge. A firefighter strategy we call “sustainable action” (“Continuous action”, in French), has become the federal standard: it is not a question of stopping fires, but of containing them as much as possible.

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