A government wildfire management representative says a handful of actions it’s taken in the past month or so are completely unrelated to a provincial wildfire review.
Currently, the province is looking at its own response to the 2015 wildfire season, which saw evacuations of more than 10 thousand people from their communities.
In December, crews around Montreal River in Air Ronge thinned the trees, removed dead wood, and piled and burnt the remaining brush. The process, called fuel management, provides a buffer space where there’s “not a solid wall of fuel” if a fire is approaching, said wildfire management branch’s executive director, Steve Roberts.
Starting this week, the Ministry of Environment is posting its job opportunities for firefighters – the employment is listed in 17 different northern Saskatchewan locations, from April to August.
If you’ve wondered if this is a departure from the Ministry of Environment’s usual winter routine, Roberts says this is just business as usual.
In relation to the call for firefighters, he said this time of year is typical for them to start advertising.
“We always do it in January and early February because we want to have all these positions offered to folks for the summer well in advance so as soon as we can get them from school, from, if they come to college or if they’re working and they have to leave another job we can have them first thing in spring for training and then get them out to the fire line.”
As for the local fuel management projects, he said the Ministry of Environment has already identified what needs to be done in previous reports, they just need the funding in place before those plans are put into action.
The Air Ronge project, which covers seven hectares, was approved in the 2015-2016 budget.
“All communities in the north have a mitigation plan. We propose projects and they’re pretty much proposed based on community interest – we have to have community buy-in – so based on our funding we’ll set some high priority targets, we’ll work on that. Typically that work does not get started until after November,” Roberts said.
Roberts also says fire breaks that had been created during the summer, for example, the bulldozed areas around communities like La Ronge, are now free for the local authorities to manage as they want.
In some cases, that means maintaining them as walking trails or using them as snowmobile path.