SPSA says 30 active wildfires are burning in Saskatchewan

Special air quality statements blanketed almost the entire province of Saskatchewan on Tuesday as dangerous amounts of wildfire smoke in the air continue to make breathing difficult.

Steve Roberts, the vice-president of the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA), told Gormley there were 30 active wildfires burning in the province.

“Six of those are not yet under control. The other ones are in various stages of containment or protecting of specific values at this time,” Roberts said.

Roberts said it’s not the fires themselves that are the problem, but rather what they’ll impact and what they will threaten “both from a direct fire threat … and also a smoke threat to people in the province.”

According to Roberts, direct threats include threats to properties, lives or towns.

He added the province does a lot of work modelling smoke based on weather patterns and smoke gradients.

“We do that on sort of a larger scale … almost like satellite tracking of where there’s smoke and we can then issue air advisory alerts,” he said.

Roberts said the province also keeps an eye on the situation in northern communities with smoke monitors that send data to a website.

That website displays atmospheric smoke levels community by community, which he said helps guide the SPSA’s local decisions with regard to protecting residents from the smoke.

Roberts added he expects a low pressure system to come into the province on Wednesday or Thursday, which should shift the winds.

“(People are) going to see the smoke start to clear in southern Saskatchewan just because of the wind pattern changes,” he said.

As for whether this has been bad year for wildfires, Roberts said it’s hard to tell, since smoke is not border specific.

According to him, a lot of the smoke choking Saskatchewan residents actually originates from fires in Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

“As soon as we get a northern wind pattern that pushes it south, it’s pushing all the smoke, so it’s not just our local fires. It’ll be all fires in the area,” he said. “That’s why … in Eastern Canada, smoke from Quebec is going as far south as New York and those cities.”

Roberts said the main issue with this year’s wildfire season is that there has been a large number of fires for this time of season.

“Having this amount of fires as early — like in the May-June period — is not a typical pattern. It’s a little off, so it’s really ramped up things,” he added. “The weather patterns facilitated a very dry period without a rain break and then when fires began to start they continued to escalate.”

Roberts said although the province experienced a “decent” winter, there were no spring rains after that.

“The heat arrived as soon as the snow disappeared and we were kind of in a period where the forest had not greened up, the leaves hadn’t come out, the grass hadn’t turned green, so all the fire activity was actually very volatile when we did get fires,” he added.

“The heat early in the spring, of course, generates breezes and winds that push these fires around pretty rapidly.”