The Chief Fire Information Officer for the province says there is a silver lining from past two fire seasons as preparations are underway for this year.

Along with the lessons learned from wildfire seasons past, Kevin Skrepnek says there are several technological improvements that could also be of use too.

“We’ve put together a new research and innovation team that’s looking into that,” he said.

“We had a symposium just recently here in Kamloops actually a few months ago with a number of companies that came to kind of pitch us different technologies, different ways we could be doing things so there’s definitely things we could be leveraging to improve what we are doing, not just in terms of response, but predicting fires and mitigating their effects on the ground.”

As for funding those technological improvements, Skrepnek says an increase in the base firefighting budget to $101 million this year will help.

“We’ve been spending a lot more than that in the past few years particularly given how busy its been, but by having that bigger starting point, that bigger initial budget, it lets us do a lot more prevention, a lot more preparedness before the season starts in terms of getting our crews ready, in terms of doing whatever we can to prevent those fires,” Skrepnek added.

He also pointed out that the Wildfire Service has also learnt “significant lessons” after the past two wildfire seasons, with lots of after reports and recommendations for improvements that officials are following up on.