When I woke up today the region around the Salish Sea was enveloped by smoke again as it was yesterday. Roughly 800 miles to our north-northeast in northern Alberta, two dozen wildfires are raging in late May.
In May!
In northern Alberta!
The combination of these northerly latitudes with how early in the season this is strikes me as bizarre. Like science fiction coming to life.
The Alberta government said hot, dry and windy conditions fueling the northern wildfires aren’t going away soon and will make fighting them difficult, so people need to prepare themselves.
“This fight is going to be a tough one,” said Devin Dreeshen, Alberta’s minister of agriculture and forestry. “The weather is not co-operating for the long-distance forecast for the next two weeks. It’s more of the same.”
Evacuation orders
The wildfires raging across the northern part of the province have forced about 10,000 people from their homes — double the number from the beginning of the week.
“We began the day [Wednesday] with approximately 5,500 evacuees and we currently have over 10,000,” Dreeshen said in an update Thursday afternoon, after a day of hot temperatures and gusty winds led to the explosive growth of several blazes burning out-of-control.
About 5,000 people have been out of their homes in and around High Level in northwestern Alberta for more than a week. This week even more people from that region, as well as from near a separate wildfire by Manning about 250 kilometres to the south, were evacuated.
According to our local weatherman the smoke will be shifting eastward blowing the smoke across the northern Midwest in the coming days.
UPDATE: The CBC’s top story tonight is the mass shooting in Virginia, but there was also this story:
'This fight is going to be a tough one,' Alberta's forestry minister says as fire season starts early
Forest fire season in Canada is already in full swing, with multiple communities under evacuation orders and thick smoke covering parts of Alberta, B.C. and northern Ontario.