The deputy director of BC Wildfire Service says more than a dozen fines for previous wildfires will likely be handed out this year.

Les Husband says fines issued this year would be for fires from 2016, as he says it typically takes two to three years to prepare an order.

“Typically it takes a couple years to put the packages together, especially all the suppression costs that have to be gathered up. So we kind of work within a two-to-three-year window. So typically we’ll be determining fire cause and costs from fires two years ago going into the third year. So 2016 will be heard in 2019.”

He says those fines can range from a few thousand dollars to several million dollars.

“I would generally say it fluctuates between probably 25 and 40 per cent of our starts are human-caused. And each one of those has an origin of cause done to determine how it started and by whom. Any time that our investigators can determine that it was a human start and how it started, each one of the human-caused fires, we’re mandated to try and recover costs,” Husband says.

“There’s a responsibility to make sure that fire’s looked after and put out at the end of the day, so we don’t have escapes onto Crown land that cost us a lot of time and energy, and money, to put those out. That’s what this is intended to be, this process, to remind people that when they do burn they need to be responsible for the fire that they ignited.”

In 2016 there were 1,050 wildfires across B.C. and 564 were human-caused. That year, the provincial government spent $129 million to battle blazes.