This is a public service announcement. In case you missed it, there is a complete and total fire ban on for most, if not all municipalities across the Pontiac. This extends to people who have been given a permit to burn in contained fire pits.
The Pontiac is a tinderbox right now. We haven’t had a good rain in weeks. You can see it the fields and lawns which have gone from green to yellow to brown, in some cases. You can see it in the underbrush in our forests, where many of the smaller plants have begun to wilt.
And you can see it in our front page story – four separate small wildfires ignited in various hard-to-reach locations across this county over the last three days. In all cases, provincial firefighters had to be brought in as our local fire crews could not get their trucks deep enough into the forests where these fires were growing.
As we were assembling this paper here on Tuesday morning, another fire was reported in the Waltham area.
SOPFEU, the province’s fire protection agency, says much of the region will remain in a very high risk fire danger index today, Aug. 12, and that under these conditions, it doesn’t take much more than a spark to ignite a fire.
SOPFEU’s fire index map shows that the risk level will return to moderate tomorrow, following showers predicted for the region on Tuesday evening, but in a phone call with SOPFEU’s Outouais spokesperson on Monday, she expressed doubts this rain would be enough to sufficiently rehydrate the ground, fields and forests to the extent needed to reduce the fire risk.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” she said. The forecast for the rest of the week? Wednesday, 28 degrees and sunny. Thursday, 26 and sunny. Friday, 28 and full sun. And Saturday, 31 and more full sun.
Great for the beach. Not so great for our firefighters who, by the way, all deserve a huge round of applause. Firefighters from three separate departments have spent hours over the weekend trekking through the bushes in their fire suits, in 30-degree weather, to do what they can to control the flames and call in SOPFEU for support.
Thorne’s recently formed fire crew was first to respond to the fire near Sparling Lake. That team jumped in their trucks midway through a community open house day for the fire department to figure out where the nearby smoke was coming from. Nothing like jumping in the deep end. One resident I spoke with had nothing but good things to say about that fire department’s response, and the care firefighters provided to the people living nearby.
Bristol firefighters spent their Sunday evening deep in the bush trying to locate the source of smoke that had been spotted by somebody across the Ottawa River.
And yesterday, firefighters from the Campbell’s Bay-Litchfield department raced their trucks through the fields in an attempt to reach a fire that ignited in Litchfield.
If you see one of these firefighters, give them a high five, or pour them a cold glass of something.
And please, for everybody’s sake, don’t even light a birthday candle outside.
