THUNDER BAY – A quieter forest fire season in Northwestern Ontario can be attributed to consistent and widespread spring rains, says a Ministry of Natural Resources official.
The rain across the province largely reduced the spring fire danger, but a warmer and drier fall meant an active fire season across Ontario, said Chris Marchand, fire information officer.
The widespread early spring rainfall kept the season from emerging into a situation where you have 20 to 40 new fires a day, said Marchand.
“We just didn’t see that this year,” he added.
Of the 479 forest fires in Ontario in 2024, 218 of those were in the Northwest.
The fires burned more than 89,800 hectares, which is well below the 10-year provincial average of 694 fires burning 201,000 hectares.
With a lower fire hazard in the region this year, Marchand said they sent fire crews and incident management team members to Manitoba, Alberta, BC, Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador and the Northwest Territories to help out a busy national fire season.
“We also deployed resources to the U.S. to support their wildland firefighting efforts,” said Marchand.
“If it's not busy in Ontario and we have the capacity to help elsewhere, we do that,” he added. “So, it was a busy season in some sense.”
Marchand said the ministry sees variability from year-to-year concerning the fire season.
In 2021, it was the busiest fire season on record. The following year was the quietest on record.
“It’s really very difficult to make any sort of prediction about what is to come in the next couple of months,” he said. “Every season is highly variable and just influenced by the actual weather trends that develop throughout the fire season itself.
"Our response to that uncertainty is to evolve and adapt our approach to respond as needed to, to keep people safe and to protect our communities for sure."