With fire season approaching and the region experiencing hot and dry conditions, Kamloops Fire Rescue is monitoring the situation closely.

KFR Captain Jamie Chase says while it is tough to say what the fire season will hold for the city, he suggests there is a potential for it to be busy.

Chase’s concerns come noting the unusual weather trends over the last year.

“The hot dry fall that we had, followed by the hard cold snap that arrived almost right away, froze the ground pretty solid so the snow that we got over the winter piled up on top of it,” explained Chase.

“Now we’ve had almost the opposite happened this spring that we went from cold winter to boom, almost straight in the summer, so most of that snow either ran straight off or evaporated into the atmosphere.”

As a result, Chase says they are finding drought conditions in the Kamloops area to be quite high right now.

“That’s the measurement of how much moisture is in the deep layer of soil down where the big tree roots are.”

However, he suggests it will be a waiting game to see what June has to offer in terms of moisture, noting that May and June are typically the wettest months in the region.

“Not going to make any predictions as to what we are going to have for fire season until we have gotten through that but, at this point, May has been pretty dry and you can see in the forecast the first week of June is pretty dry as well, so we will just say things are getting interesting for sure.”

Chase says 2003 was the last time Kamloops experienced a major interface fire event.

He says while the Juniper fire on Canada Day in 2021 had the potential to be a major event, it was a fairly small event thanks to the quick response of firefighters.