What do you see happening over the next few weeks?

Yeah, great question.

When I look at the fire season so far, when you look at the numbers and, you know, we look at the counts of fires, which you mentioned, there's been over 4,000 fires so far, but most of those are out.

There's just over 800 active fires right now in the country, which is not, even for this time of year with a month left in the core fire season, that's not really remarkable in terms of numbers.

We also look at the area that the fires are burning.

And also with area burned, it's not a really remarkable year so far.

It's certainly there's been lots of wildfire.

What are conditions like in the country right now? Where are you seeing critical areas that need to be watched over August?

Why are we seeing more intense wildfire seasons? Like what is it about the climate, about the soil, about, you know, temperature that is really making things challenging now?

I mean, fires are pretty simple.

Like hot, dry, windy weather is what you need.

And you can get very fast rates of spread.

So if you do get an ignition and that can be lightning ignition, which is natural, but also people start fires and then that could be a campfire or it could be somebody on an off highway vehicle, or it could be a train, it could be a spark from a chainsaw.

So people start fires, lightning start fires.

And if it happens to coincide with hot, dry, windy weather, there's a problem.

Is that a reasonable argument? You

Can you tell me a bit about that?

Yeah.

So I ...

It was when I was a student at the University of Toronto, um, and I was, I was studying wildfire at that time, so as a graduate student, and I worked on, uh, a helitack crew.

So in Ontario, uh, they have four person, three person, or four person crews that those are the crews that are dispatched to fires when they first get reported, and they're called Ontario Fire Rangers.

And I did that for six years, working my way up from the low level crew member up to crew leader.

My last two years, I worked as a, as a crew leader and, and got to travel around and fight fire actually here in Alberta, but also in Montana and Oregon.

So then obviously starting your career out in Ontario, starting your studies out in Ontario, and then traveling a little bit in, in your career as a wildfire fighter, what then brought you to Alberta?

What do you mean by that?

Well, you know, the, the boreal forest.

So the boreal forest is a vast ecosystem.

Uh, it, it, it stretches right across, uh, the country, the country.

There's actually 55% of Canada's land base is, is, uh, um, the boreal zone, and, and that's a crown fire ecosystem.

So those, those kinds of fires are, um, very much part of the natural process in renewing the forests.

We have fire-adapted species in the boreal.

Uh, is there, is there any reason or anything we can do to, to mitigate those fires that though they're not coming near a community, they are creating a health hazard?

What do some of those strategies look like?

So there's always been a lot of interest and, and, and trying to be proactive about minimizing fire impacts.

So, um, one of the ways you can do that is manage the fuels.

Like, we can't do much about the weather.

[laughs] The hope is that you can modify those forests to make them less flammable.

So they're naturally flammable b- because they have evolved with fire, and they're fire-adapted species.

How do you then make them less flammable? Um, well, try to keep the fire on the surface, and you do that by reducing those ladder fuels that I was talking about.

Mm-hmm.