More than 27 million acres burned in Canada in 2023, eight times the area compared to the average of the last 30 years, the country’s authorities announced today, which is being swept by more than 200 active fires. After western Canada and its provinces Alberta and Saskatchewan in early May, it was the turn of the eastern regions and the province of Nova Scotia to be hit by “unprecedented fires».
The government sent the military to Nova Scotia today to help fight wildfires, and more firefighters from the United States will arrive in the region to fight them in early summer, Canadian Public Safety Minister Bill Blair announced.
“The weather conditions in this period of time are absolutely unprecedented and are obviously a cause for concern,” he said, as relayed by the Athens News Agency. Today, 211 forest fires are raging in the country and 82 are out of control, he explained.
The arrival of a heat wave and strong winds in the east could cause “extreme fire behaviour”, according to firefighters. At Nova Scotia, which is the focus of all the concerns in recent days, 16 fire fronts remained active today. One of them reached the suburb of the largest city in the province, the Halifax, forcing the authorities to evacuate areas northwest of the city and 16,000 people to move away from their homes. The fire appears to be now partially under control.
However another fire near the Lake Barrington remains out of control after burning 200,000 acres. It is the largest fire recorded in the province. More than 2,000 people were ordered to evacuate the area earlier this week as the fires spread.
“We are very far from getting out of trouble. We continue to face a very dangerous and volatile situation. We need Mother Nature on our side in this,” said David Steeves, of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources.
Smoke from wildfires that have been raging across the country for three days has reached the Atlantic coast of the US, causing a spike in air pollution in the state of New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania.
In western Canada, more than 60 fire fronts are still burning in Alberta, a month after a fire emergency was declared, and another 20 in Saskatchewan. Canada, which is much more quickly affected by global warming than the rest of the world, has been experiencing extreme weather events in recent years, the intensity and frequency of which is increasing due to climate change.
Source: News Beast
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