Monday September 8, 2025 | VANCOUVER, BC [Reporting from VICTORIA, BC]
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Today Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, Kelly Greene, led a BC wildfire and drought situation update along with Forests Minister Ravi Parmar and Randene Neill, Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship.
This comes after a long month of August where wildfires continued, often one after the other. For the past week in particular, skies across many parts of southern BC have been smoky leading to air quality concerns for people’s health.
Today’s noon-hour update included the usual updates on numbers of evacuation orders and the supports available at ess.gov.bc.ca and info at EmergencyinfoBC.ca.
Have grab and go bags ready — clothing,food, water, tolietries and medication, and copies of important documents, supplies for pets. Visit PreparedBC.ca for more information.
Fines for drone use in wildfire areas:
Forests Minister Ravi Parmar has the BC wildfire Service under his ministry. Today Parmar warned drone users to not use drones for ‘great images’ in wildfire areas.
The maximum fine for interrupting the work of wildfire operations with a drone is $100,000. “Give your head a shake” he says to whoever was using a drone that caused aerial wildfire services to be grounded for a day (including damage to the aircraft).
There are still 144 wildfires across the province, according to the BC Wildfire Service dashboard today; 14 of those started in the last 24 hours. There is continued lightning; on average about 80% of wildfires in BC are caused by lightning — currently about 14% are considered to have been caused by human activity (intentional or otherwise), and 7% are still undetermined as to cause.
“The new normal is longer more intense wildfire seasons,” said Parmar.
About one-third of current fires are out of control (which means they can spread).
Aerial operations continue to be challenged in areas where smoke remains thick, limiting visibility, as stated on the BC Wildfire Service dashboard today.
Conservation to help with salmon spawning:
Randene Neill, Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, reviewed the need for sensible water conservation.
She said that water use restrictions in areas where salmon are impacted by stream flows will be lifted as soon as possible.
Cooler nights in September will help:
This year’s fire season continues into September which is not usual, said Cliff Chapman, Director of Wildfire Operations, BC Wildfire Service, today. He added that in the 2025 wildfire season that the heat didn’t build up in BC “the way we saw it” in more intense years (e.g. 2021 and 2023).
There was a heat wave over the past 10 days, but the longer nights of the fall season will help with cooling things down. We’re seeing a September fire season but that’s not abnormal, said Chapman. “But it’s not something we see eveyr year at this level.”
This year there’s been “a little more time to rest between fires than we have had in previous years,” said Chapman in answering a media question today.
Chapman said that BC is “only slightly below the average” number of fires in a year would be 1,500. This year in BC there have been just over 1,200 fires, he told media today. But this year, BC is slightly above the 10-year-average for hectares burned, he added.
He noted that there were “pretty heavy impacts” in the Prince George Fire Centre earlier this year; hundreds of thousands of hectares were on fire early in April, May and June, said Chapman.
Compared to 2017, 2018, 2021 and 2023 fire seasons “we didn’t see the heat build up” in this year’s fire season, Chapman noted.
Clear wildfire communications:
Having three BC ministers deliver a wildfire update shows the importance of clear, authoritative communications. In August when many of the updates were delivered by frontline wildfire communications staff there was less efficiency and less concise context.
Today Parmar made a point of saying that the BC Wildfire Service falls under his Forests Ministry.
===== RELATED:
NEWS SECTIONS: WILDFIRE MANAGEMENT | EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS