With the 2021 wildfire season officially behind us, the BC Wildfire Service is looking back on what it called a “tremendously challenging” season.

It was the third worst season on record – both in terms of both costs and area burned – behind only 2017 and 2018.

Speaking on NL Newsday, Fire Information Officer, Taylor Colman, says the conditions leading up to last summer made the fire season stand out, after two relatively quiet years in 2019 and 2020.

“Over the winter of 2020 into 2021, majority of the province saw below average levels of precipitation and snow. With the lack of precipitation, we were faced with above average temperatures,” she said.

“We were then hit with the heat dome at the end of June and that was sort of the perfect storm really of dry conditions leading up to that point, and then somehow things got even drier to levels not recorded.”

Colman says similar dry conditions in Alberta and the United States also made it harder to fight fires last year as multiple agencies were competing for firefighting resources and equipment.

“The heat dome was really the kicker that no one could have predicted. And then after that, we were hit with repeated lightning events, which you know contributed to multiple wildfire starts per day,” Colman added.

“The fire two weeks of July we were seeing an average of 40 starts a day.”

COVID-19 limited the Province’s ability to bring in firefighting resources from out-of-province. Those that were able to assist on the ground kept to their own bubbles to prevent COVID transmission.

At the height of the wildfire season, there were over 300 active wildfires in B.C., with 67 Wildfires of Note, a number of which were located around Kamloops. All told, the Wildfire Service says there were 181 evacuation orders and 304 evacuation alerts put in place last year.

The Kamloops Fire Centre was the most impacted, accounting for about 5,000 of the 8,700 square kilometres of land in B.C. that was burned last summer. The Kamloops Fire Centre also saw 459 of the 1,642 fires in the province last summer.

More than 550 structures across B.C. were destroyed by wildfires, including 343 homes. The community of Lytton and most of the Monte Lake were among the most impacted.

B.C. was under a provincial state of emergency due to the fires for just under two months, from July 21, 2021 until Sept. 14, 2021. About 60 per cent of the wildfires were lighting or natural caused, 35 per cent were human-caused, with the other five per cent still to be determined.

The total cost to fight wildfires between April and September of last year was about $565 million.

Read the 2021 Wildfire Season summary here.