Fires

[maple_leaf_eh]

Originally Posted by Marc Montgomery

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Of course Canada has hundreds (literally) of fires, many of them massive, across the boreal forest, but as these tend to be more northerly, there are very very few communities, and generally result in much less infrastructure and personal loss.
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Wildfires are attacked immediately when they are encountered. The idea is to keep the burns supervised, but not to extinguish them completely. The forests need fire to regenerate. Fires are a provincial responsibity (as are forests). There are no-notice attack crews on standby throughout the summer, sitting with their kit loaded on contracted helicopters. The water bombers and spotter planes are on call if these hard-a$$ guys decide they can't steer it satisfactorily. Someone mentioned the big Martin Mars waterbombers on Vancouver Island in another thread.

There are behaviour and predictive models that use weather, soil moisture, forest floor compostion, slope and past burn history to predict where things will likely get more interesting. One big difference between US and Canadian firefighting doctrine is, the Americans dig huge firebreaks and let things burn down, while Canadians use hoses and pumps to extinguish the flames.