British Columbia wildfires are burning out of control! There were a number of air quality warnings issued cross BC in summer 2018. Smoky air flew all the way to Alberta and even cross the border to US. It makes me curious what is going on with BC wildfires and what the situation is used to be.
Wildwire datasets for previous years and current year (updated in May 2018) were gathered from DataBC, data published by BC Wildfire Service. For relevance and clarity, data prior to 1980 is ignored.
- Close to 80,000 wildfires recorded, and 4.76 million hectares burned
- While the total number of fires has dropped 40% since 2000, areas burned i.e. fire damages have sharply increased 250%
- A diminishing trend with human-caused fire. On average, it accounts 45% of all fires and 24% of all damages.
- 2017 marks the worst fire damage in BC history, 1.22 million hectares burned, compared to a total of 3.54 million for all 36 years prior.