Government data revealed on Saturday that Canadian wildfires have burnt more than 10 million hectares (24.7 million acres) this year, a record-breaking total that has surpassed scientists’ most gloomy estimates.
According to official statistics from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC), the previous record-breaking year for the number of hectares burned was 1989, when 7.3 million hectares were burned over the course of a full year.
In just six and a half months, this year’s fires consumed an area approximately equal to Portugal or Iceland.
Since January, there have been 4,088 fires in all, several of which have burned thousands of hectares of land.
A 19-year-old firefighter passed away on Thursday, and more than 150,000 people have been forced to relocate.
“We’re dealing with immense areas,” Colonel Philippe Sansa, who heads a detachment of French firefighters deployed in hard-hit northern Quebec, told AFP.
“The fire we’re managing is 65 kilometers (40 miles) long, which poses enormous organizational challenges.”
Sansa said that his team would be able to send considerably more firefighters and helicopters to battle a fire that was 100 times smaller in France.
Even though the majority of fires have happened far from populated areas, they nonetheless seriously harm the ecosystem.
“We find ourselves this year with figures that are worse than our most pessimistic scenarios,” Yan Boulanger, a researcher at Canada’s natural resources ministry, told AFP.
“What has been completely crazy is that there has been no respite since the beginning of May,” he said.
No province was spared as of Saturday, when there were 906 active fires nationwide, 570 of which were rated out of control.
In recent months, the catastrophic situation has changed all throughout the nation. In May, at the start of the wildfire season, Alberta in the west grabbed headlines for its unheard-of fires.
A few weeks later, an Atlantic province with a warm climate, Nova Scotia, took over. Next came Quebec, where massive flames produced smoke plumes that even covered sections of the United States.
British Columbia has experienced a drastic change in the situation since the beginning of July, with more than 250 fires started in only three days last week, the most of which were caused by lightning.
With below-average rainfall and warm temperatures for several months, a large portion of Canada is experiencing severe drought.
Due to its topography, the nation is warming more quickly than the rest of the world, and it has experienced extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency have increased as a result of climate change, according to scientists.
