It looks like fire season may be over in the Kootenays, given a change to cooler weather. September is supposed to be clear and cooler, but dry, so we may have another few weeks before we are really in the clear. Lightning strikes over the weekend set off some hotspots in places, but nothing close to what the Sitkum, Argenta, and Pend D'Oreille fires were. Fire fighters can still be seen coming back to Nelson in the evenings, though most have now left the region.
I think we were lucky that things didn't get worse in summer 2007. The weather stayed so hot and dry, and we all see the increasing dead pine on the hillsides. Many pine you see now that are green may have beetle inside them, and will turn red next summer. On top of that, we were the worst area of the province for fires this year, and there are other parts of the interior with much larger expanses of dead pine than in the Kootenays. We might have gotten off lightly this year, but it may just be prolonging some real catastrophic fires waiting to happen.
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