It has been a “fairly consistent” fire season in New Brunswick, according to the province’s wildfire prevention officer.
“We had a fairly decent year,” Roger Collet said in an interview with our newsroom this week.
The latest figures show there have been 272 fires reported so far this year, including a number this week.
Collet said that is a bit above the 10-year average of 242 fires for this time of the year.
“Our fire season started a little bit earlier this year. The snow was gone quite early, especially in the south part of the province, so we had a fire starts early on in the season and it’s been fairly consistent over the summer,” he said.
However, the amount of area burned by those fires is considerably lower than usual, he said.
Just under 210 hectares have burned to date compared to the average of 449 hectares.
“Probably about 80 per cent of our fires are fairly small anyway. The difference this year is we didn’t get very many fires that were over even 10 hectares. There might have been three or four fires that were greater than 10 hectares,” said Collet.
“Normally, we’d maybe see one up in that 50- to 100-hectare range, so that would elevate the numbers on that side of it, but we didn’t have any of those this year.”
Collet said consistent rain and high humidity throughout the summer months helped to keep the fire situation under control in our province.
“We got rain pretty consistently, not over the top but it seemed when things started to dry up a bit, we always seemed to get a little bit of rain just to keep things down,” he said.
“Those high humidity days, even if we do get a fire start, they don’t tend to go very far or very quickly.”
We also did not have a lot of wind this summer, said Collet, which also helped the situation.
While forest fire season officially ends Thursday, he expects some fires into November, especially with the drier conditions we are currently experiencing.
Collet said it is important always to be vigilant no matter the time of the year.
