These warming days don’t just signal the coming of spring.
The province’s Department of Lands and Forestry kicked off fire season Friday.
That means restricted hours and conditions under which someone can have open fires or burn branches and similar debris in their yards are now in effect.
No fires are allowed between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., and anyone looking to burn beyond those times needs to check the burn safe web page ( www.novascotia.ca/burnsafe) to see if and when they can do so.
Anyone wanting to burn large piles must contact the department and get a permit.
Last year, 190 wildfires burned 251 hectares of forest across the province. That was significantly lower than the more than 700 hectares in each of the previous two years.
Although there were high temperatures and not much rain last summer, high humidity helped keep the fire losses down.
And while there wasn’t much snow this winter, the province’s supervisor of fire management, Jim Rudderham, is hoping for a wet spring to ease the risk of early season fires.
“We do have snow cover now, not a lot, but we’re expecting a lot of rain this weekend,” he said. “Hopefully we get that. The woods are still damp so we don’t expect a lot in the next day or so, but in the spring it doesn’t take took awful long for things to dry out again.”
There wasn’t much rain last summer, but Rudderham said it was a fairly wet fall “so we’re hoping that areas that were dry late last summer into the early fall got the water replenished.”
The southwestern part of the province has been dry for a few years, so “that is an area of concern that we will continue to support and stations resources so we’re able to respond as needed,” he said.
He said predictions on the severity of a fire season are not easy.
“Every year we have to wait and see what we get,” he said. “We were lucky last year that when it was so hot it was very humid and we didn’t have a lot of wind, so that always helps us too.”
Humidity like last year has the added benefit to fire numbers of keeping people from wanting to go into the woods, he said. The large majority of wildfires are caused by people.
The bottom line is to watch the burn safe page and be careful with fires, especially at this time of year.
“As the grass becomes uncovered when snow melts it becomes very volatile because it dries out can burn very fast,” Rudderham said. “If it opens up this weekend with the weather and then the winds pick up, it’s going to be dry again.”
