Coastal Fires

[Glacier]

The largest fires burning right now in BC are in the Coastal Fire Centre.

Ramsey Creek = 39,537.5 hectares
Tesla lake = 16,500 hectares (most of it is burning into the Northwest Fire Centre)
Dean River = 17,770.7 hectares

These are all in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park.

There are also a large cluster of fires on Vancouver Island. The only fire of note over there is the Nanaimo Lakes fire at 182 ha. This is a human caused fire as is the 120 ha Mt. Hicks fire near Agassiz. The other large fire burning in the south coast is the Silver Skagit fire at 2,043 hectares.

most of the large fires in the Coastal Fire Centre are near other fire centres. Three large fires are burning down the Kliniklini River (also spelled Kleena Kleene) just west of the Cariboo boundary. The largest of which is the 2,400 hectare Upper Kleena Kleena River fire. These fires are burning in excess of 5,000ft with 11,000 ft mountain peaks within a couple of kilometers, so they aren't going anywhere.

[Drip_Torch]

Good Valley Main, Zeballos, is a wildfire I've noticed that isn't of note - yet. I think the first evac alerts just started going out an hour ago.

https://www.mycomoxvalleynow.com/40081/ ... contained/

[Drip_Torch]

Port Alice; average rainfall 3.3 meters. That's 10 feet of actual rain falls on the community in the average year.

There is currently a wildfire burning on hwy 30 about 11 kms out of town. … and anyone that's ever spent any time near Port Alice says, there's a what and it's burning where?

[Drip_Torch]

I'm betting if you've lived in Port Alice your whole life this is equivalent to an alien invasion. There's a 1400 ha wildfire 60 kms away from town.

https://www.cheknews.ca/firefighters-co ... ce-481276/

[Drip_Torch]

I'm going to change gears here a bit, with this post and give a bit of a personal account and observation.

Back in 1985 a month of my life was spent in a fire camp located in the Silver Skagit. Of course, 1985 was 9 years before Storm King Mtn, an infamous wildfire that took the lives of 14 firefighters in Colorado. Storm king really was the game changer in how we look at the risk/reward matrix in wildland fire suppression. Three years before that, in British Columbia, we had our own much smaller incident that started changing the way we look at things.

Again, back in 1985; we had the Shaw fire in Silver Skagit and (this all based on memory) it was a full on suppression effort, with about 115 crew, a camp in the valley and between 7 and 12 medium bucket ships flying. It was a thing and it had its moments.

So here we are in 2018 and on August 4 th, lightning started a fire further west in the Silver Skagit valley. That fire has been placed in Modified Response. It has been quietly doing its thing, largely unnoticed for the last three weeks and other than trying to hold it to the east side of the valley there doesn't appear to be much in the way of fire suppression going on.

Over the last couple of days, the north and west sides of Shawatum Mountain appear to have burned off and from what I can tell - no-one noticed.

In the grand scheme of things, looking at this with the experience of stumbling up and down that hill for 10 to 12 hours a day in the summer heat, having some idea what it cost financially, and knowing what it could have cost a couple crews when it blew up... I have to ask, what did we gain?

We put off the inevitable for 33 years. Was it worth it? I don’t know.