Nightfall once brought firefighting reprieve, but no longer, Canadian study shows

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Jason Brolund, the fire chief in West Kelowna, B.C., says he's seen thick smoke turn day to night in his years as a firefighter, but the opposite happened when a fast-moving blaze tore through his community one night last August.

Jason Brolund, the fire chief in West Kelowna, B.C., says he's seen thick smoke turn day to night in his years as a firefighter, but the opposite happened when a fast-moving blaze tore through his community one night last August."We saw our fiercest fire behaviour taking place well after dark, in the early morning hours. when we had the worst battles," Brolund says of the McDougall Creek fire, which ultimatelydestroyed or damaged nearly 200 properties.

The days of a skeleton crew on night patrol are gone, Brolund says. It marks a shift from the belief that darkness typically means calmer fire conditions."But that is not what happens now." "Any kind of information of how active a fire will be at night is really critical … especially if a fire is approaching a town, like West Kelowna last year," Flannigan says.

Canada's drought bulletin shows pockets of"exceptional" and"extreme" drought in central B.C. and southern Alberta, while drought conditions in swaths of both provinces were classified as moderate to severe at the time of the Feb. 29 update. The study used wildfire records and satellite data to examine more than 23,500 blazes across North America from 2017 to 2020. The researchers identified 1,095 overnight burning events associated with 340 wildfires and found the vast majority spanned at least 10 square kilometres.

That's significant, Flannigan says, because it's a crucial time for rallying firefighting resources with the goal of containing flames before they spread.The darkness hampers visibility and the information available to crews. It's harder to operate heavy equipment, and air support is limited, he says."These things could now happen at any time," Brolund says of nighttime flare-ups.

 

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