Canada’s wildfires continue to break records – and more are set to fall

An extraordinary wildfire season has led to record numbers of evacuees across Canada, federal officials said at a briefing on the national wildfire situation on Thursday.

And with the wildfire season getting longer and more intense – thanks in part to climate change – that situation will only get worse as the year goes on.

The unprecedented magnitude of this season’s fires – largely caused by high temperatures and drought-like conditions in many areas – has prompted an estimated 155,856 Canadians across the country to flee their homes, following 132 evacuation orders.

That’s about 1.5 times more evacuees than in 2016, when the Fort McMurray fire represented the previous high of the past 40 years.

Of those evacuated this year, more than 4,500 are still under evacuation orders; 3,400 of these are from First Nations communities.

And Natural Resources Canada officials predict the fire situation will get worse before it gets better.

“It is no understatement to say that the 2023 bushfire season has been and will continue to be record-breaking in a number of ways,” said Michael Norton, director general of the Northern Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service.

He said that in addition to the record number of evacuees, the total area burned by wildfires so far this year is greater than the previous total for an entire season since Natural Resources began tracking records. And those fires are being fought with the help of more international firefighters from more countries than Canada has seen before.

“And we’re only about halfway through the fire season,” Norton said.

Meteorologists and fire researchers predict a tough summer ahead.

“What we’re seeing in the West is a sustained drought from 2022 onwards, which tended to intensify during the latter part of the summer in 2022,” said Richard Carr, fire research analyst at CFS. “And that went on through winter in many areas and then spread eastward in 2023.”

What often causes that, he continued, is a very dry layer of organic matter on the forest floor, which becomes more fuel for a fire. Such conditions cause very deep-burning, intense fires that can last for weeks, possibly all summer and possibly even winter if there is a layer of peat in which fires can smolder and flare up again in the spring.

“I’ve seen the drought increase in eastern Canada over the past month or six weeks,” Carr said. “Right now we have different levels of drought stretching from coast to coast. There is currently some drought in virtually every province and territory of the country – the most intense areas are in central British Columbia and southern Alberta.

Those drought conditions will be combined with forecasts for “very extreme or abnormal heat” in BC, Yukon, NWT and the western parts of Nunavut, as well as parts of Quebec, said Environment Canada meteorologist Armel Castellan, who warned of preparedness.

“So, along with the northern prairies and northern BC, there’s definitely a very strong heat signature and also a dry one in the days and weeks ahead,” Castellan said.

With more of the same hot and dry weather forecast for most of the country, Natural Resources expects increased wildfire risk from BC and the Yukon across the country to western Labrador in July. In August, that high-risk area will decrease slightly, but the highest-risk areas will still stretch from BC to western Quebec.

If there’s any good news in the wildfire forecast, it’s that forecasts for Atlantic Canada – where Nova Scotia was ravaged by a record number of wildfires in May – have been downgraded to a normal wildfire risk for those two months.

For the rest of the country, this means that already record-breaking numbers will continue to rise for the rest of the summer.

On June 27, with three months left in the wildfire season, Canada surpassed its all-time record for total area burned by wildfires. That previous figure – for an entire season – was set in 1989, when 7.6 million hectares were burned.

On July 5 this year, 8.8 million hectares have already been scorched. That’s nearly 11 times the 10-year average for this time of year, Norton said.

“This number is literally off the charts because we had to expand the range of the ‘y’ axis on this chart, as we showed many of you this number just a month ago,” he said, referring to a plot by Burnt area over the last 10 years.

The season so far has been unprecedented not only in the severity of wildfires, but also in their number and spread.

As of July 5, 3,412 fires had been recorded across Canada; 639 of them are currently active, with 351 of them as “out of control”. That figure is 20 percent higher than the 10-year historical average for this time of year.

What is also unprecedented is that those fires have spread across the country, rather than being more regionally clustered as is normal.

In BC, a single fire, the Donnie Creek fire, on 580,000 acres is responsible for more than half of the area that burned in that county this year.

And this spring, Nova Scotia has already endured the largest recorded wildfire in the southern part of the province, while at the same time another fire half an hour’s drive from Halifax caused the evacuation of some 16,000 residents.

“In addition, the amount of area burned so early in the year would have been remarkable in itself, as spring fires usually stop burning in May and June, once the forest greens up and fires don’t get a chance to get big.” Norton said.

“But that didn’t happen this year. Especially in the northern parts of the country, the fires have continued to burn since spring.”

This year’s wildfire season boasts another record-breaking number of international firefighters who have come to Canada to help fight fires.

To date, 3,258 firefighters from 11 countries have fought fires along with Canada’s 3,790 local firefighters. Of these, 1,765 are currently still active.

Some, such as those from Australia, New Zealand and Chile, are in the low season for wildfires in their home countries. Others, such as those in Spain and Portugal, have had to return home as the wildfire season in Europe begins to ramp up.

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