Warmer temperatures, gusty winds and no rain continued to cause unpredictable conditions for firefighters in northern Alberta on Monday, but officials said measures to keep flames away from threatened communities were working.
The largest blaze in northern Alberta remained about three kilometres southwest of High Level, where crews have been bulldozing, back-burning and water bombing to ensure flames don’t creep closer to the town.
To prepare for the risk of forest fires during the upcoming summer, the Commission is launching today the first fleet of firefighting aircraft under the new rescEU system to tackle natural disasters. So far seven firefighting airplanes and six helicopters will be part of the rescEU fleet during an initial transition period, and the Commission is (more…)
ACADEMICS PUT down the authorities’ failure to control this year’s smog crisis in the North to an inappropriate “command-and-control approach”, adding that this problem will persist if the strategy is not revised.
The recent years have seen an alarming increase in forest fires across India. According to the Real Time Forest Alert System of the Forest Survey of India (FSI), the number of forest fires shot up to 14,107 from 4,225 between November 2018 and February 2019.
The fires that devastated Indonesia in 2015 were chiefly linked to drought, topography and population, researchers have learned. Fires were most likely in flat, sparsely populated areas where there had been little rainfall. Although the connection to rainfall was no surprise, the other influences were unexpected.
The Forest Survey of India’s large forest fires monitoring programme data shows that there are 192 large, active fires in the country today
As many states face higher than normal maximum temperature, instances of large fires have increased more than six times across the country within this week.
The forestry department has signed a contract with a private company for the lease of two helicopters to fight fires during the summer, the department announced on Friday.
The northern province of Mae Hong Son continued to see forest fires at the weekend, with one of them almost reaching a revered Guan Yin shrine in Muang district Sunday night, officials said.
A fire broke out in the forest behind the shrine on the Mae Hong Son bypass in Ban Mai Ngae village of Tambon Pang Moo at 7 pm, surprising and scaring villagers and motorists.
Forest fires are causing snow to melt earlier in the season, a trend occurring across the western U.S. that may affect water supplies and trigger even more fires, according to a new study by a team of researchers at Portland State University (PSU) , the Desert Research Institute (DRI), and the University of Nevada, Reno.