Alberta Wildfire already preparing for summer firefighting efforts

It may only be February, but Alberta Wildfire officials are already making preparations for the start of this year’s wildfire season.

It’s looking like a promising start to wildfire season in terms of precipitation in Alberta compared to 2024. This past year, more than 1,100 fires burned 700,000 hectares in the province.

“We are in a better position, we’ve had that winter snowfall, we’ve had cooler conditions,” said Christie Tucker, Alberta Wildfire’s information unit manager.

The season officially begins March 1. On Thursday, Alberta Wildfire officials gave media a behind-the-scenes look at the heart of wildfire efforts in the province.

Even though it’s the middle of winter, firefighters are already battling several wildfires in the Lac La Biche and Fort McMurray areas in northern Alberta that are still burning from last year.

“It’s going out there and controlling those fires,” explained Cory Davis, the wildfire predictive services manager at Alberta Wildfire. “So it’s using water trucks, because ice covers most of our lakes, and tanks with water to try and get those fires out, and lots of hand digging and heavy equipment mostly.”

Alberta sees an early start to wildfire season – something officials say is a tragic lesson learned from the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire.

“We have the earliest wildfire season in all of Canada just because of those spring conditions that we see,” Tucker said. “Once the snow melts in Alberta and the moisture evaporates, you have a lot of dead dry grass, dead dry trees, and that really increases the chances you’ll have a large scale wildfire.”

Last year, Alberta Wildfire hired 100 seasonal firefighters, and it says it will be doing the same this year.

Alberta Wildfire crews were also assisting firefighting efforts in California earlier this year, telling media they learn something each time they help in another jurisdiction, and they are looking at new technology to predict and battle fires.

“We have in the past looked into how we could use AI for fire prediction modelling,” Tucker revealed. “Can we use that information to guess where a fire is more likely to start in a certain area?”