In Quebec, the taiga continuously burns over 1.5 million hectares. The record fire crackles 1,300 kilometers north of Montreal, devouring dry moss under a cloudless but smoke-filled sky. This fire is a significant portion of the 9.9 million hectares of woodland and grassland already burned in Canada. Since the beginning of the year the flames have devoured an area the size of Portugal. On Thursday 13 July, a firefighter died during an intervention in the west of the country.
This season of fire, “worst ever recorded”, according to the Canadian governmentit’s only halfway through. THE Canadian Inter-Agency Center for Wildland Fires (CIFFC)which coordinates the action of firefighters nationwide, notes that, out of 3,989 fires identified since January, 901 are still active. “So far this is less than in 1989, a landmark year when there were 12,204 fires, comments Marieke de Roos, communications officer at CIFFC. But the fires of 2023 are burning larger spaces. » Reported over the past four decades, this trend is confirmed across the country from a study du Centre: the number of forest fires is decreasing, but their intensity is increasing.
The Great Plains of Alberta, in the central west of the country, are accustomed to fires, but the flames have already affected eight times more hectares than the five-year average. And while June rains have brought down the bulk of the fires after a particularly abrasive month of May, firefighters remain on the alert. “We have several weeks of intense heat to contend with and the Northwest is already warming up”warns Josée St-Onge, spokeswoman for the Alberta agency for fighting forest fires. The same is true for the Yukon, a Canadian region bordering Alaska that has so far been relatively spared from embers.
Quebec has blazed more than usual, and 1,044 firefighters are battling fires closer to municipalities than ever before. The proliferation of outbreaks encourages them to focus their efforts on the most spectacular fires: On the Alberta side, some 2,100 firefighters hose down just five wildfires. Even if it means leaving tens of kilometers of forest to burn further north. “Priority is putting out fires near communities and industries”press MMyself St-Onge. The strategy of the firefighters, which we call “sustained action” (“sustained action”, in French), has become the federal standard: it is no longer a question of stopping fires, but of containing them as much as possible.
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