Rain was yesterday expected to start help clear smoky air in eastern Canada, but it might not reach the forest fires raging in the province of Quebec until days later, a government meteorologist said on Saturday.
There were 426 fires across Canada on Saturday morning, 144 of them in Quebec. Canadian forest fires regularly occur in summer, but the scope of this conflagration — and its early arrival — are unprecedented.
The fires on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts have burned 4.4 million hectares so far, forced thousands of Canadians from their homes and spread smoke that has left residents from Toronto to New York gasping for breath.
Photo: AFP / BC Wildfire Service / Handout
Rain was expected yesterday in southern Ontario and southwestern Quebec, which would likely help clear smoke, Federal meteorologist Gerald Cheng said.
The rain looks set to reach more northern parts of Quebec — where the biggest fires are burning — starting tomorrow, but only 10mm to 20 mm of precipitation is expected, Cheng said.
“Our concern is that it’s not a lot of rain,” he said.
Quebec Minister of Public Security Francois Bonnardel said that the situation in the central and northwestern parts of the province remained difficult, with several towns threatened.
Fires in northeast Quebec were considered “stable,” he said.
“This is a first in the history of Quebec to fight so many fires, to evacuate so many people,” he said. “We are going to have a fight that we think will last all summer.”
About 14,000 people are under evacuation orders in the province, with Bonnardel having declared that “we haven’t yet won the battle.”
Officials said that by today there would be about 1,200 firefighters, including more than 100 from France, battling blazes across Quebec, a heavily wooded province of 8.5 million people that covers more territory than Germany, Spain and France combined.
In the Pacific province of British Columbia, weather improved on Saturday as firefighters battled a large 20,000 hectare blaze in the remote foothills of the Rocky Mountains near the eastern border with Alberta.
Winds that had been blowing westward toward the mostly evacuated community of Tumbler Ridge, about 1,000km northeast of Vancouver, turned to the east.
Temperatures cooled, enabling firefighters to get closer to the fire, British Columbia Wildfire Service information officer Karley Desrosiers said.
The fire is just 4km from Tumbler Ridge, where about 150 of its 2,400 residents remain.
“I can’t say the risk has been alleviated, because it absolutely has not, but at this exact moment, the weather is working in our favor,” Desrosiers said.
Drizzling rain has helped, but the forest is so dry from drought that the area needs heavier rain to make a major difference, she said.
Additional reporting by AFP
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