REVELASTOCK, British Columbia, Sept 12 (Askume) – As summer draws to a close in Canada, the 2024 wildfire season is shaping up to be one of the most destructive ever, with a fire that destroyed a tourist town in the Canadian Rockies.
Looking at the total area scorched, this season ranks among the six most severely scorched seasons of the past half century. Still, 2024 is proving to be much less severe than last year (the worst season ever), and not as bad as many feared.
The total cost of wildfire damage soared when a third of Jasper, a popular tourist town in Alberta, was destroyed by fire in July. According to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, the fireThe resulting insured loss was estimated at C$880 million (US$646.73 million).
According to the Canadian Inter-Agency Forest Fire Centre, a total of 5.3 million hectares (13.1 million acres) of land will have burned in 2024, with more than 600 fires still burning across the country, mainly in British Columbia.
This would make 2024 the worst season since 1995, except last year, when fires burned a record 17 million hectares of land.emitting more carbon than some of the world’s largest carbon emitters .
Canada’s wildfire season typically begins with melting snow in April and lasts until September or October, with peak activity in July and August. Climate scientists say that as the world warms, average temperatures in Canada will rise, making the wildfire season longer and more destructive.
In April, the Canadian government warned2024 could turn out to be another “catastrophic” wildfire season amid ongoing drought and forecasts of above-average temperatures in western provinces .
“We are preparing for a potentially worse year like 2023,” said Christy Tucker, Alberta’s wildfire information manager. She said the province is hiring a third night vision helicopter and 100 firefighters and has announced an early start to the 2024 fire season as a precaution.
But dry weather and unusually strong lightning in June and July sparked hundreds of fires across the province, including the one in Jasper.
“This has had a significant impact on everybody in Alberta,” Tucker said.
Suncor Energy Corp (SU.TO) , Canada’s second-largest oil company, had to cut production at its Firebag plant in northern Alberta due to the threat of nearby wildfires , but the impact on oil supplies was much less than last summer.
“Zombie” fire
Wildfire agencies also must battle so-called “zombie fires,” which broke out last summer and continue to burn into Canada’s long winter.
“I’ve never seen as many fires as I’ve seen last year, and some of them were as big as Prince Edward Island,” said Mike Flannigan, a wildfire expert and research chair at Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. “Huge.”
Prince Edward Island is one of Canada’s coastal provinces, with an area of 566,000 hectares, roughly equal to the area of the Toronto metropolitan area.
Flannigan estimates that winter fires starting in 2023 will cause about 500,000 hectares (about 10%) of Canadian land to burn in 2024.
The reduction in evacuation orders that affected millions of people in the northeastern United States and Canada last year has reduced the spread of smoke, making the wildfire season of 2024 look milder.
Western Canada benefited from cooler weather in late August that reduced some of the fire activity, but based on historical parameters, 2024 will still be a devastating year, said Kira Hoffman, a postdoctoral researcher and wildfire ecologist at the University of British Columbia.
“This is a change from the baseline syndrome. Last year it was very bad, so this year we thought just a third of the burn would be enough,” he said. “But there’s nothing unusual about it.”
Many experts warn that climate change will lead to longer, extremely hot and dry “fire seasons” and an increase in the number of wildfires.
“If you look at the total area burned each year or the number of wildfires or the total damage caused by wildfires, you’ll see that it fluctuates, but if you draw an average trend line, it’s still pretty consistent,” said Ryan Ness, director of adaptation at the Canadian Climate Institute.
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