There’s been no significant growth on any major wildfires in the Kamloops area over the past week, according to the BC Wildfire Service.

Fire operations manager Todd Nessman says stable weather is expected over the next seven-to-10 days.

“We’re feeling reasonably confident moving into the end of August. We’re starting to see some of the effects of fall come in to help us. Really what we’ve seen is more fall like weather patterns than August-like weather patterns. Which has been very helpful for us in our operations.”

Nessman says the fire risk remains higher in parts of the Cariboo and the Okanagan, where there hasn’t been quite as much rain. Nessman says the White Rock Lake fire, and particularly its eastern flank near the Okanagan, is the most active wildfire in this area.

He says more seasonal weather today and tomorrow will raise the fire risk, but not dramatically.

“All the signs are sort of pointing towards a fairly stable environment, where we’re not going to see some of those elevated fire behaviour conditions that we were quite concerned with, and we experienced not that long ago. Even a week ago. So all things considered we’re trending the right way,” Nessman says.

“And we’ll continue to see some of the downsizing of several key assets we have, with helicopters, air tankers and structure protection. And that’s just an indication that things are progressing well on the fires.”

B.C. remains in a provincial state of emergency from wildfires, as more than 3,700 properties remain evacuated and more than 12,000 properties are on alert.

There have been hundreds of structures lost to wildfires in the past two months, although an exact number is unclear. And fires have burned more than 862,000 hectares, making this the third-worst fire year in the province’s history in terms of land burned, behind only 2018 and 2017.