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NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
Although the forest fire season in the NWT is not officially over until Sept. 30, things are basically finished for this year unless something totally unexpected happens.

Only 30 fires are still active of the 273 fires this year in the NWT, outside of national parks.

"They would be smoldering right now with the rain that pretty well went through everywhere. There won't be much left of them," said Bill Mawdsley, director of forest management with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (ENR). "Most of them are in the South Slave right now."

Mawdsley said no serious problems are anticipated between now and the end of the fire season, noting smoldering fires will be monitored and none are being actively fought.

As of Sept. 13, a total of 294,000 hectares had been burned.

ENR started deploying crews to fires in late May and essentially it didn't finish until just before Labour Day.

"A lot of the fires that we were on took more than the usual initial attack resources," Mawdsley said. "In a normal pattern year, the initial attack would take a crew, or part of a crew, and half a day to a day to clean up. What we were finding this year is we were having to commit people for a number of days and, in some cases, more than one initial attack crew."

That's because the fire season started with existing drought conditions, he noted. "And we didn't really have any rain, especially across the south, for pretty well the whole summer."

Given those conditions, the fire season was actually not as bad as it could have been in the NWT.

"It could have been worse," Mawdsley said. "We could have had more fire incidents near communities and threatening communities. The conditions were dry enough. We just didn't have the starts."

As an example of what could have happened, he pointed to a massive fire which forced the evacuation of the Alberta hamlet of Zama, about 100 km south of the Alberta/NWT border.

"We didn't have a fire like that, and it wouldn't have taken much to get one," Mawdsley said.

All of the fires close to communities were contained before they threatened the communities.

Notable fires in the NWT included the largest at 38,000 hectares in the Trout Lake area which is still smoldering.

The so-called Swan Lake fire - at a still-smoldering 14,000 hectares - took the most time and resources after starting on June 1 on the east side of the Hay River south of Enterprise.

"We had to go back to that later in the summer because the wetlands that normally it would have just smoldered around in were dry enough that it was just continuing to spread and threaten Enterprise," Mawdsley said.

Other notable fires where crews were on scene occurred near Behchoko, Fort Smith, Deline and Inuvik.

In all, 87 fires were fought, about 30 per cent of the total, which is lower than normal.

The only known damage is some trapping areas were burned over.

Mawdsley said it is ENR's plan to travel to key communities over the winter to talk to stakeholders about the firefighting this summer.

"That will lead to our looking at what we're going to be doing differently next year to try and make sure we're responding to the people," he said.

As for the national parks in the NWT, there were eight fires in the NWT section of Wood Buffalo and eight in Nahanni, along with a fire at Great Bear Lake National Historic Site.

There were no fires in the national parks in the northern part of the NWT.

Jean Morin, the fire management officer for Parks Canada's southwest field unit covering Wood Buffalo and Nahanni, said the main fire event in the NWT section of Wood Buffalo was a fire on the Salt Plains Access Road/Parsons Lake Road and a resulting burnout operation.

"We had limited options for fire management in that area because there wasn't any fire history for the last several decades," he said. "All the material there was continuous and available for combustion. So this burn was really strategic to give us more fire management options in the area for the future."

Morin said the fire season is basically over as a result of recent rain and cooler temperatures, but some fires are still smoldering.

"Now until snow comes, we keep our eyes open obviously because there is so much fire on the land," he said. "We still do the odd detection flight just to make sure those fires like along the road and things like that are not coming up."

In all of Wood Buffalo National Park - in both the NWT and Alberta - there were 33 fires this season and 275,506 hectares were burned.

"It's the second biggest year in area burned in the history of the national park," said Morin, noting the record is from 1981 when 350,000 hectares burned.

The number of fires in all of Wood Buffalo was a little higher than the annual average of 24 and almost half of them had personnel deployed to them.

Morin noted the fires in the park did not destroy anything of value, such as cabins, and Highway 5 to Fort Smith was only closed once for less than a day for the burnout operation.

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