Canada has been affected by numerous fires this year and 10 million hectares have burned this year in the North American country.
This figure exceeded the most pessimistic predictions of specialists and is higher than the previous all-time high recorded in 1989, when 7.3 million hectares burned for an entire year, according to national data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC).
The area burned this year, in just six and a half months, is roughly equal to the size of Portugal or Iceland.
In all, there have been 4,088 fires since January, including many fires that have burned hundreds of thousands of acres. More than 150,000 people have been displaced and a 19-year-old firefighter died on Thursday.
“We are dealing with huge areas,” Colonel Philippe Sansa, who heads a detachment of French firefighters deployed in northern Quebec, which was heavily affected, told AFP: “The fire we are managing is 65 kilometers long, which poses enormous organizational challenges. “
Most of the fires occurred far from inhabited areas, but they still have serious consequences for the environment.
“This year, the numbers are worse than our most pessimistic scenarios,” Yan Boulanger, a researcher at Natural Resources Canada, told AFP.
As of Saturday, there were 906 active fires in the country, including 570 considered out of control, with no province spared.
In recent months, the disaster situation has changed across the country: In May, at the start of the wildfire season, Alberta in the west was in the spotlight, with unprecedented fires.
A few weeks later, Nova Scotia, an Atlantic province with a temperate climate, took over, followed by Quebec, where huge fires created clouds of smoke that blanketed parts of the United States.
Since the beginning of July, the situation has changed dramatically in British Columbia, with more than 250 fires breaking out in just three days last week, most of them caused by lightning.
Much of Canada is experiencing a severe drought, with months of below-average rainfall and high temperatures.
The country is warming faster than the rest of the planet, due to its geography, and has faced extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency have increased due to climate change, according to scientists.
Source: TSF
