The BC Wildfire Service is planning a pair of controlled burns in the Red Lake area as they battle the massive Sparks Lake fire, northwest of Kamloops.
Fire Information Officer, Shannon Street tells NL News it will be dependent on the weather and if conditions are favourable.
“So one of them would be around the Wadley Hill area, which is north of Red Lake. We’re expecting that that one would be a low intensity planned ignition operation, that could get underway today,” she said. “The second one is the Sabiston Lake area, and that would be potentially as early as Saturday.”
“Wind definitely is one of the conditions that they look at on site, so kind of depending on the topography the winds might be a little bit different right on site there than they have been in the forecast for the general area. So crews will definitely be keeping a close eye on what the winds would be.”
Street adds more accurate mapping shows the Sparks Lake Fire is now estimated to be at just over 45,000 hectares in size – the largest in the province.
“We haven’t seen a lot of significant fire activity on any areas of the Sparks Lake wildfire,” she added. “There has been those portions of growth around the perimeter but it hasn’t seen any significant growth over the last several days.”
There are 90 firefighters, ten helicopters, and 58 pieces of heavy equipment on scene today, along with an incident management team and structure protection crews as well as firefighters from the Skeetchestn Fire Department.
“Structure protection personnel and crews are continuing to work in the Red Lake area, northeast of the Red Lake area, north of Gisborne Lake, and in the Skeetchestn community to apply FireSmart principles and triage communities to determine future equipment requirements should the fire expand,” the BC Wildfire Service said.
Crews are also assessing the terrain north of the Deadman Valley to identify feasible ground for control lines.
Evacuation orders are in place for nearly 300 properties due to the Sparks Lake fire, while a number of evacuation alerts are in effect implementing hundreds more.
The fire broke out on June 28 and its suspected to be human caused.
