In this aerial image, an aircraft, centre, flies near a wildfire burning near Barrington Lake in Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, on Wednesday, May 31, 2023. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Communications Nova Scotia **MANDATORY CREDIT**
HALIFAX – A federal scientist with the Canadian Forest Service is pointing to the driest conditions since the Second World War as a key factor behind the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia in the past century.
Sylvie Gauthier says she reviewed the records and found the 235-square-kilometre fire in Barrington Lake that swept over bogs, fields and woodlands in southern Nova Scotia had the fourth highest rating for dryness of the woods since 1900, and the highest since 1944.
The province’s Department of Natural Resources says the fire, which forced 6,000 evacuations and destroyed 60 houses and cottages, was the largest wildfire since the early 1920s when it began keeping records.
Gauthier says the extreme dryness, along with coastal winds, may have enabled the fire to burn through the roughly 17 per cent of Crown lands rated as “wet” trees, and to burn or move across fields and bogs that make up about a quarter of Crown land in the area.
Anthony Taylor, a forest ecologist at the University of New Brunswick, says up until the recent fires, there had been a downward trend in the Maritimes in wildfires over the past century due to humans’ growing ability to extinguish such blazes.
But he cites recent research papers indicating climate change is expected to increase average temperatures “by several degrees” in the next three decades, creating an increase in the number of days each year when fires are likely.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 17, 2023.
