Bad Fires Conditions Continue In BC
The CBC outlook isn’t promising for British Columbia: Lillooet wildfire less than 1 kilometre from town
A wildfire burning near Lillooet, B.C., continued to grow in size Friday night, and officials said Saturday morning the blaze was less than one kilometre from the town.
Crews braced themselves for an intense battle as the fire on Mount McLean, southwest of Lillooet, nearly tripled in size from an estimated 1,000 hectares last Monday to about 2,600 hectares [10 square miles] on Saturday.
Officials said the blaze near the southwest Interior town, about 180 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, was in danger of growing even larger given the tinder-dry conditions and thunderstorms in the forecast for Saturday afternoon.
“The fire is burning on steep slopes above Lillooet and west of Lillooet in very, very dry conditions,” said fire information officer Gary Horley.
“The area is under an extreme drought and fuels are critically dry and easily combustible,” he said.
…
“Anything will start a fire right now. The fine fuels in the forests have less than two per cent moisture content and it doesn’t take anything to start a fire,” Horley said.
“It’s not just cigarettes, it’s any equipment that’s being operated — motorcycles, ATVs, anything that’s a heat source. If a fire starts it’s almost impossible to stop it.”
Meanwhile, Premier Gordon Campbell issued a rare warning Friday, urging travellers to rethink their recreational plans this long weekend and avoid the backcountry.
In all, more than 500 wildfires are burning across British Columbia, where conditions are extremely dry and temperatures are in the high 30s [90s F].
The CBC’s BC wildfire map is getting crowded at the south end of the province. The lightning that is causing most of these fires is expected to continue. With conditions so dry, whatever rain that accompanies the storms isn’t enough to alter the ground conditions.
9 comments
vancouver is where i was planning to end up if i ever decide to become a canadian. my second choice, montreal, is looking better by the day.
ot: i’ve got computer problems, it’s slowed waaaaaaaaaaaaay down [as in, it takes 5+ minutes to write a comment of this length] and everything freezes up. is there a quick-n-easy way to figure out, without taking it to the computer repair place, whether it’s [still] got a virus, whether some electronic part is about to go, or whether it’s become a zombie? have i left off any other possibilities?
.-= ´s last blog ..of Gods and Goddesses and single p[r]ayer health care =-.
Montreal is a very nice city, in the European sense. Vancouver is rather like Seattle.
OT: Clean out the Recycle Bin and Defrag your hard drive [Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter] to see how much disk space there is available. Disk activity is a big drag on speed. See what that does before we start taking things apart.
done did that [that’s about the extent of my computer management skills, so i do actually do this occasionally]. there’s some new stuff in the recycle bin since the last time, so i’ll re-empty, re-scan, and re-defrag and let you know if it helped.
.-= ´s last blog ..of Gods and Goddesses and single p[r]ayer health care =-.
Have always loved Vancouver. Gorgeous. Montreal is lovely in a historic, European sort of way. Quebec is terrific but I would have to brush up on my French. I don’t know if I could ever really get into Poutine, though.
.-= ´s last blog ..The Drapers are having a little get together =-.
Jill, the French requirement comes and goes. They have great bookstores.
OT: Hipparchia, you might want to use the disk clean-up utility to clear out Temp files. No one seems to be very good at picking up after themselves in that regard.
montreal is the only part of canada i’ve ever spent any time in. i loved it, but i’d have to learn french. not that anybody needs to learn french to live there and survive just fine, but *i’d* feel the need to learn the language [beyond my current vocabulary, which is tiny and almost all cajun].
i’ve never been to either seattle or vancouver, but from what people have told me, i think i’d like them both.
.-= ´s last blog ..Do want =-.
Most people pick up French just by living there. It’s a lot easier than trying to get it from a book, as most courses speak a version of the language that no one actually speaks in real life.
that’s how i learned most of my spanish, even with 12 years of it in school.
.-= last blog ..Do want =-.
No one speaks school Spanish, and Spanish in Spain isn’t the same as Caribbean Spanish, which is different than Mexican Spanish, and Colombian Spanish is a force unto itself. I have a neighbor from Texas whose family is split between Mexico and the US, and he swears that Cubans don’t speak Spanish. I know some of what he means, even though I’m hearing with a Baja Spanish filter, it has a different feel, like the difference between New York and Alabama, it’s speed and pronunciation.