More rain needed to fight wildfires as we head into August

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – August is one of the hottest and driest months of the year, and while it’s great for the patio, it doesn’t help fire wildfires.

Meg Krawchuk with SFU says the moisture we’ve received in the last couple of weeks has helped, but not as much as you may think. “If you think about what rain does when it comes into your garden for example after a dry period. You get rain and it percolates into the top levels of the soil but when you actually dig down deeply into your garden you find that there is not actually much water there.”

“We need a lot more rain and a lot more continuous rain to actually make a difference in terms of soil moisture and moisture that then gets up into foliage,” she adds.

Krawchuk notes no matter what we do BC will always have to deal with these blazes, because fire is a natural part of our ecosystem. “Fires are inevitable and we need to think of ways of living with fire.”

She says August is typically one of the driest periods of the year and with fires already burning hundreds of thousands of hectares, this year could be one for the record books.

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