Expert warns fire season in northern British Columbia getting worse

Mike Hager in the Globe and Mail: A massive wildfire in northern B.C. shows that the province’s forests are increasingly primed for such blazes because of climate change and the El Nino weather pattern, an expert says. The 240-square-kilometre fire, first reported late Friday on May 8 near Little Bobtail Lake southwest of Prince George, is only 15-per-cent contained, according to a Monday update from the B.C. Wildfire Branch.

Since Saturday, heavy winds almost doubled the size of the blaze and halted the progress of 270 firefighters, according to the branch.

Lori Daniels, an associate professor in the University of B.C.’s forestry faculty, said Monday that the Little Bobtail Lake fire is symptomatic of more intense and longer fire seasons the province is now experiencing. Global warming has driven this change, Prof. Daniels said.

She added, however, that it has also been fuelled by debris that has built up after decades of firefighters stopping smaller, more frequent fires that once rejuvenated forests with low-intensity burns. “I hope this is a cautionary message to anybody working in, living in and using our forests, that we have to be careful,” Prof. Daniels said. “Even the forests in what we consider a wetter, cooler forest type within the province currently are burning at a higher intensity, which also shows other parts of the province are hot and dry.”

B.C. could continue to warm over the next 100 years, according to some global climate-change models, exacerbating the forest-fire threat....

A 2003 fire in British Columbia, via NASA