N.S. wildfire season off to a slow start after cool, wet spring

CBC

a day ago

The wildfire season in Nova Scotia has been off to a "slow" start, according to the manager of forest protection with the province's natural resources department.
Wildfire season in Nova Scotia runs from March 15 to Oct. 15 and Scott Tingely told CBC News that so far, the number of fires and the amount of hectares burned are both below average at this point.
"We had a pretty cool, wet spring so far, so that has certainly helped kind of mitigate the conditions and the risk," Tingley said.
As of Thursday, 39 fires have burned about 35 hectares across the province so far.
Changing weather conditions
This past week, however, has been somewhat concerning because of the hot and windy conditions, he said. There was a small fire in West Gore on Wednesday evening that burned through about 1.5 hectares.
The wildfire situation in Nova Scotia has changed rapidly over the last week, according to data from Natural Resources Canada. On Tuesday, the department listed the fire danger across most of the province as low. And as of Thursday, that classification was raised to high for the bulk of the mainland and Cape Breton.
Tingley said this week's low humidity and high temperatures, along with breezy winds, do create favourable conditions for wildfires, but we're now in a "green up" period. That's important for bringing shade and moisture to dry areas.
"We're starting to see a lot of the trees starting to leaf out," he said. "The trees greening up are kind of mitigating some of that risk as well."
CBC meteorologist Ryan Snoddon said this year, the biggest issue is how long it's been since the last rainfall.
"With leftover dead grass and shrubs from the winter, it doesn't take long for things to dry out," Snoddon said. "On that note, we've had a pretty good May with some rain every few days."
Mitigation since record wildfire year
Tingley said in the two years since after the province's most devastating wildfire season on record, the Department of Natural Resources has implemented all the recommendations that were in a report about the department's response in 2023.
Some of those changes include updating equipment, renewing the helicopter fleet and improving internal communication procedures. He said the department has also worked on adding more personnel to the teams that deal with wildfires.
"That was a recognized gap and we've done a lot adding capacity to our ability to respond, particularly around incident management teams and getting more people trained to respond and support the efforts," Tingley said.
The wildfires of 2023 tore through areas of Shelburne County and the Upper Tantallon area just north of Halifax, destroying more than 200 homes and burning 25,000 hectares of forest. Last year, things shifted dramatically, with the province seeing its least active wildfire season on record, with 83 wildfires burning about 47.5 hectares of land.
Tingley said some of that change could be due to residents changing their behaviour when it comes to burning since 2023. A fine of $25,000 was temporarily put in place for illegal burning in the province. That fine was made permanent earlier this month.