Officials from Saskatchewan Environment are busy preparing for the upcoming forest fire season.
Steve Roberts is the executive director of the Wildfire Management Program based in Prince Albert.
Roberts says as mentioned in the last provincial budget, there will be an upgrade to one of the CL-215 water bombers based in La Ronge.
“In recent years we having been changing those over to turbine engines, a modification called the 250-T, and we have four of those now and we just got approval in this budget to convert a fifth one over to the turbine version which is the modern version”.
Maintenance crews will be working to ensure the entire fleet of fire fighting aircraft is ready to go, and pilots will be training over the next couple of weeks.
Fire fighting ground crews are also being trained.
Roberts says there will be some improvements made at two northern airstrips.
“The Ministry of Highways is doing the work up in Stony Rapids this summer and they have also announced that they are going to do dome surfacing work at Buffalo Narrows and that will be a benefit for our program and those are two areas that we had looked at for targeting into the future as well”.
Roberts says with the introduction of the new Wildfire Act, the process of getting a burning permit has changed, and information on the new requirements is available at the Ministry of the Environment website.