After a long season of heavy snowfall and flooding, fire season has arrived in Saskatchewan with six active fires as of the morning of May 27.
“You’ve got all that winter dead, all the dead brown grass, all the stuff that’s happened that hasn’t greened up yet. So it makes it really quite flammable until things start to really green up,” says Aaron Buckingham, president of the Saskatchewan Volunteer Firefighters Association.
He says humidity levels are a problem.
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“What we’re looking for is something we call a crossover… that means it’s 27 degrees here, and the relative humidity is 27 percent. What happens at the crossover is if the daytime temperature is 27 and the relative humidity drops below 27, say 20, 18, that’s when the fire is at its most unstable.”
Although currently dry, this year has been a mixed bag of moisture with snow still on the ground in parts of the province.
Even Prince Albert National Park, which experienced heavy snow and some flooding, now has a fire ban and some volunteer fire departments are already seeing some action.
“We’ve had two grass fires,” said Les Kroeger, Hanley Rosedale Fire Chief. “One, it got out of control and it got out of control very, very quickly. This was before we had seen any moisture. And recently, we had one, it was caused by a vehicle fire on the highway.”
Buckingham says this year seems to be off to a slower start, but it could start at any time.
“The forecast shows favorable conditions for things to happen again. I hope it’s not on the scale we had last year.”
Watch above for more on the start of fire season in Saskatchewan.
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