MONTREAL (AFP) – Canadian wildfires have burned more than 10 million hectares this year, a record-breaking figure that has surpassed scientists’ most pessimistic predictions, government data showed on Saturday.
The prior all-time high occurred in 1989, when 7.3 million hectares were burned over the course of an entire year, according to national figures from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
The area burned this year, in just six and a half months, is roughly equivalent to the size of Portugal or Iceland.
In total, 4,088 fires have occurred since January, including many blazes that have scorched hundreds of thousands of hectares. More than 150,000 people have been displaced, and a 19-year-old firefighter died last Thursday.
“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 kilometres long, which poses enormous organisational challenges.” Sansa said his team, in France, would be able to deploy far more firefighters and helicopters on a blaze 100 times smaller. The majority of fires have occurred far from inhabited areas – but they still have serious consequences for the environment.
“We find ourselves this year with figures that are worse than our most pessimistic scenarios,” a researcher at Canada’s natural resources ministry Yan Boulanger told AFP.
“What has been completely crazy is that there has been no respite since the beginning of May,” he said.
As of Saturday, there were 906 active fires in the country, including 570 deemed out of control – with no province spared.
