Active Weather
No active weather alerts anywhere in British Columbia this morning.
The Environment and Climate Change Canada alert feed, read at 5:00 this morning Universal time, carries 283 active alerts nationally. None of them are in this province. The alerts are held by Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and the Northwest Territories.
That is the ordinary early September pattern on the coast: the autumn storm season has not opened and the summer pattern is easing.
Infrastructure
The item in this province today is fire, and specifically the resources moving toward it.
The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre's national situation report for September 7 shows British Columbia with 35 fires under full response covering 260,343 hectares, of which two are out of control, eight are being held, and 25 are under control. A further 56 fires are under modified response and 45 under monitored response. Five new fires started yesterday, all of them human caused.
The number that tells the clearest story is the mobilization table. British Columbia is currently receiving four Q-400 airtankers, four heavy helicopters, a thermal scanner, 297 type one firefighters, 24 incident management team personnel, and 12 overhead staff through the national sharing system. That is the entire national mobilization for the day, and all of it is going to one province.
That does not mean conditions are worsening. It means the national system is doing what it exists to do: moving crews and aircraft from quiet agencies to the busy one while the rest of the country is calm enough to lend them.
The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre's national situation report for September 7 puts the national preparedness level at 3 on a five step scale, with 97 fires under full response across the country, of which 21 are out of control, 19 are being held, and 57 are under control. The season total stands at 5,303 fires and 4,484,135 hectares.
British Columbia's season total stands at 1,420 fires and 477,506 hectares.
The province did not report an agency preparedness level in yesterday's national report.
Public Health
No air quality alerts are active in British Columbia this morning. Air quality warnings elsewhere in the country are held by the Northwest Territories, where smoke is affecting Fort Simpson.
Smoke concentration depends on wind direction as much as on fire size, and it changes over short distances and from hour to hour. For anyone within drift range of an open perimeter, the practical guidance stays the same: when the air is visibly hazy, keep windows closed, run a filter if you have one, and postpone hard outdoor exercise.
A box fan with a furnace filter taped to it is the low cost version of an air cleaner. It works well enough for one room and it is worth assembling before it is needed.
No boil water advisories were identified in the province.
Watch Item
The forward looking item on this coast in September is the turn toward the autumn pattern.
British Columbia sits at the end of the North American storm track, which means the first substantial atmospheric river of the season typically arrives here before it reaches anywhere else. The window between the end of fire season and the start of the rain season is short, and this is it.
That window has a specific use. Gutters and downspouts cleared before the first sustained rain rather than during it. A check that the sump pump still runs. Knowing where the shutoff is for water and gas, which is a two minute walk and a photograph on your phone.
It also carries the debris flow item. Slopes that burned this summer do not absorb water the way unburned ground does, and the first heavy rain after a fire season can move soil and rock down drainages that were unremarkable a year ago. If you live below a burn scar, the rain that finally helps the fires is the rain to watch.
The other standing item on this coast is seismic, and it does not follow a season. No earthquakes of magnitude 4 or greater occurred in or near British Columbia in the past week, according to the United States Geological Survey event feed queried at 5:09 this morning Eastern time, and no tsunami warning, advisory, watch, or threat is in effect for Canada.
Earthquake readiness in this province is the one item that is worth doing on a quiet day precisely because there is never a warning. Water stored, a way to turn off the gas, and heavy furniture secured to the wall are the three that do the most for the least effort.
Explore Today
Defensible space and evacuation readiness for households near open forest.
What to secure and what to store, on a coast where there is no warning.
The starting point if you are building household readiness from nothing.