A busy summer for BC wildfire personnel      photo courtesy BC Wildfire Mgmt

Prince George, BC – Lightning has been keeping the Prince George Fire Centre busy over the past week…

Senior Protection Officer, Brent Bye, says, "I believe we’ve had about 15 or 16 starts in the last five or six days – they’re all small, they’re not exhibiting any kind of strange fire behaviour, but we’ve been busy chasing them around and putting them out."

While Bye doesn’t believe area forests are any drier than normal for this time of year, despite the sun-filled summer, he does say we are in an abnormal drying trend right now.  "It’s a little late in the season for us to be getting active lightning or thunderstorms – so that’s a little bit abnormal, and probably just the result of the nice warm weather for the last week or so."

Firefighting personnel within the Fire Centre has been pared down by 70-percent, with most returning to school at the start of the month, but Bye says the remaining 30-percent has been extended to the end of September to wrap up the season.

The Senior Protection Officer says fire crews dealt with the average number of fires over the summer, but there were fewer big fires than in past seasons with similar hot, dry weather.  "And our number of human-caused fires are down considerably, too, so we won on both hands."