Prince George, B.C. – The wildfire season is winding down in the Prince George Fire Centre.

So much so that fire information officer Jill Kelsh, who’s usually stationed in Prince George, has been deployed to Kamloops.

“Yes I am,” says Kelsh. “We haven’t seen a lot of fires or fire activity in the north, in our Prince George Fire Centre, so I’m down here in Kamloops helping out where I can just due to their increased level at this time.”

She admits it’s been a bit of an odd year up north.

“It’s definitely been a different year. Typically we start our year with spring fires, people do a lot of spring burning and then we move into July and August which are typically our hotter and drier months where we see a lot of the lightning fires started by the summer storms.”

But not this year. “With that said, we had a much drier June than we typically do, we usually see June rains. We didn’t get that this year, our June rains came in August.”

And considering the weather outlook, Kelsh doesn’t expect much will change.

“We don’t foresee a large, hot dry period coming. We still may have nice sunny days but we don’t see getting back into that really hot, really dry summer conditions we saw in June and July.”

Is she concerned about the five hectare Bullmoose fire near Tumbler Ridge, first reported last Wednesday?

“Basically after it started, it did get a good amount of rain on the Thursday night into Friday so since then they (crews) didn’t see any visible smokes,” says Kelsh. “So with the cooler temperatures and overcast skies they’ll keep an eye on it but at this point it hasn’t grown or done any big movements.”

And although Kelsh and many of her colleagues are in Kamloops, she notes there’s still personnel in Prince George on standby if needed.

“We’ll always keep personnel in Prince George to cover off that area. There’s still some risk, we’re not out of the woods yet, especially in Vanderhoof and the Peace but we’ve brought as many resources down south as possible to help out here as well.”