Officials who work with Alberta Wildfire say current conditions lead them to believe this year’s wildfire season will be easier to manage than the last two seasons and they hope the weather continues to co-operate.
“For the majority of the province, in the boreal forest, conditions are looking really good for normal [or] near-normal precipitation and snow,” Cory Davis, the director of wildfire predictive services for Alberta, told reporters on Thursday. “There will always be wildfires during the summer, [but] right now, the conditions aren’t subject to the 2023 or 2024 season, where we were looking at extreme droughts or extreme hazard.
“At this point, we’re near normal pattern. … The immediate conditions aren’t looking as serious of a wildfire potential as we had the last couple of years.”
Davis and Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker provided an update on Thursday about the spring wildfire forecast from the Alberta Wildfire Coordination Centre in Edmonton. Alberta Wildfire is responsible for wildfire management in Alberta’s forest protection area and sometimes works with municipalities and local fire departments on their wildfire management activities.
“We are in a better position,” Tucker said.
“We had such a draw on our resources in 2023.”
The 2023 and 2024 wildfire seasons in Alberta saw many communities be evacuated at times and scorched large amounts of land. Tucker recounted how 2023 was a record-breaking year with 2.2 million hectares of land having been burned. In 2024, firefighters battled more than 1,150 wildfires that burned about 700,000 hectares.
“We started the year with 64 wildfires that were still burning from our record-breaking 2023 season,” Tucker recalled. “That already is something for our firefighters to contend with.”
Alberta’s wildfire season officially begins on March 1 this year. Tucker said 2025 has started with just half a dozen wildfires, much less than a year ago at the same time.
“[It is] a much more manageable, much lower number than what we have had,” Davis said.
However, Davis noted that even if current conditions appear better than the last couple of years, people working in wildfire management are always vigilant.
“Our two areas of concern that we’re monitoring are north of Fort Chipewyan and along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains,” he said.
Last year saw Alberta’s wildfire season start in February — earlier than it will in 2025.
“People were very concerned about the dryness of the fuels, the warm winter we had had [last year],” Tucker said.
“We just didn’t have that snowpack that we have now.”
Tucker said lightning-caused fires caused more of the Alberta blazes in July last year than normal. She said it is vital that Albertans do what they can to not be the cause of fires themselves — especially when heading out into nature right after snow melts when there is significant fire risk.
“The number of human-caused fires that we have in the spring is a lot higher,” she said. “Human-caused fires are preventable and we’d love to see that number go down to zero.”
Alberta Wildfire information unit manager Christie Tucker.
Global News
Tucker noted that the devastating fire in the Fort McMurray region in 2016 was what led to Alberta declaring wildfire season a month earlier each year than it used to. She said scenes from those fires, and from the Los Angeles-area wildfires that broke out in January, stick with firefighters and for many other Albertans as well.
“Seeing the images from Los Angeles I know really affected a lot of people,” Tucker said. “They were shocking images to many people, … seeing it so close to people’s homes and lives.
“Wildfires can be unpredictable when you have elements like wind. … We’ve seen that in Alberta as well.
“We were happy to send … two crews of 20 to help in Los Angeles. … It’s something we are happy to be able to do through our agreements with other countries.”
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Davis said his department has four meteorologists monitoring and forecasting weather conditions. He said they work seven days a week during wildfire season and give daily briefings to firefighters.
Tucker said Alberta is hiring the same number of wildland firefighters this year as the province did in 2024. She noted people have already applied and taken fitness tests and done their interviews so hiring letters are going out this week.
