Photo from the Saddle HIlls County Facebook page.

By Jeff Henson

Wildfires

Wildfire situation improves across Alberta

May 9, 2023 | 7:04 PM

UPDATE: Gift Lake Metis Settlement is under an evacuation alert.

The number of active wildfires across Alberta is decreasing, as is the number of people forced from their homes due to those fires.

In its latest wildfire update on Tuesday afternoon, provincial forestry officials said there are now 88 active wildfires burning across the province, 24 of which are still listed as out of control.

Alberta Wildfire Information Officer Christie Tucker says the northern part of the province remains a concern for them.

“They haven’t had quite the relief that we’ve had with the cooler temperatures and the humidity down south.”

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“The benefit of having this small break in the conditions over these couple of days is it gives firefighters an opportunity to assess that landscape, to move firefighting ability around where it’s needed. If fire activity is low in one area, you may have resources freed up to send somewhere else where it’s needed.”

Cooler temperatures coupled with precipitation in central and southern parts of Alberta have allowed firefighters to make some ground on the Wildfire situation in the province.

Tucker says even though numbers are improving, she does caution that warmer temperatures are in the forecast for later this week.

“We do know there is heat coming in the province. We do predict as much as we possibly can about what that’s going to look like.”

“We’re not expecting the kind of winds that we saw last weekend, which was one of the things … responsible for the growth and the extreme behaviour that we saw on some of those fires.”

The number of Albertans still evacuated from their homes due to the fires is also down from 29 thousand on Monday to just over 24,000 on Tuesday.

Colin Blair, Executive Director of the Alberta Emergency Management Agency, says they are still working on details of what assistance from the military and other federal agencies will look like.

“We work very closely with the Canadian Armed Forces, as well as Public Safety Emergency Preparedness Canada, Environment Canada and Indigenous Services Canada. We have representatives from each of those departments in our emergency coordination centre and we work with them year-round.”

“The details are being worked through right now.”

Blair also announced some clarification with regard to who is eligible for emergency financial assistance payments.

Evacuees that have been out of their homes for a cumulative total of seven days are eligible to apply for assistance.

Originally, it was stated that you had to be out of your home for seven consecutive days in order to be eligible.

So far this year, there have been 412 wildfires in Alberta, burning 410,000 hectares of forest land.