Alberta mountain towns deal with ‘low-grade anxiety’ as wildfire season begins
Global News
Alberta Forestry Minister Todd Loewen said in a statement that crews have already responded to 27 new wildfires in the province this year.
Despite spring snow still dusting parts of Alberta, it’s now officially wildfire season, and with it comes once again the gnawing worry about which community will next be touched by nature’s fickle finger of destruction.
But in the Rocky Mountain towns of Canmore and Hinton, they aren’t waiting to find out.
Both say they haven’t forgotten the fate of Jasper in 2024, when fires torched a third of the mountain town’s structures and forced 25,000 to flee in the dead of night.
“Being a community, very much like ours … a tourist destination surrounded by trees … it could happen to you,” Canmore Mayor Sean Krausert said in an interview.
“It was just a reminder of how devastating wildfire is and it certainly was one of the motivators for us in the work we’re doing.”
Krausert said Canmore is in the midst of a multi-phase project to build a fireguard around the town. The fireguards clear a strip of land of trees and other foliage to stop a rampaging fire in its tracks by giving it nothing to feed on.
One fireguard phase has been completed on the south-facing slopes of the nearby mountains that get the most sun and are therefore the driest.
A second fireguard is well underway. On a ridge overlooking Canmore, the trees have been razed, leaving behind dozens of piles of debris, some up to 10 metres high, that will likely be burned next winter.
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Alberta Forestry Minister Todd Loewen said in a statement that crews have already responded to 27 new wildfires in the province this year.
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