By Kendall Robertson

Wildfire Season Preparation Begins

Apr 26, 2018 | 3:44 PM

PRINCE GEORGE- Last year’s wildfire season was unprecedented in the province. More than 1 million hectares burned, and more than 60 thousand people were displaced. Here in the city, it took hours to register more than 10 thousand evacuees. “There was no provincial program, and that was one of the learnings from last summer,” said City Emergency Social Services director, Brad Beckett, “in Prince George, we applied for and received funding for 12 laptop computers.” Those computers will modernize the registration process, as doing registration on paper last summer was time consuming for both evacuees and volunteers. “Along with the hardware itself, we’ve been asked to be part of a provincial pilot project between Emergency Management BC and the Red Cross and we’ll be using software for registration and referrals.”

BC Wildfire Service has also started to prepare for the season, although the Prince George fire centre is off to a slow start. “In 2016 at this time we had over 50 fires, last year we had a really wet spring so we had low numbers and again we’re starting with low numbers,” said Communications Specialist, Amanda Reynolds. However, with warm and dry conditions the fire centre is warning the public to be cautious. “We know that people, public and industry, need to burn and we’re asking them to be extra cautious because all of this grass is cured and in the right conditions it can start a forest fire.” BC Wildfire has 600 firefighters ready to go to work this month and by mid-May, more than 1100 will be on call.