Fire officials say the province isn't expecting any precipitation in the next five days, meaning an already historic wildfire season is set to continue.
On Friday, wildfire officials extended the province-wide state of emergency due to B.C.'s wildfires until Sept. 15—the fourth time the state of emergency has been extended.
"Certainly this is shaping up to be a historic wildfire season," said Ryan Turcot with the BC Wildfire Service. "We've had firefighters working tirelessly around the clock and same goes for all our support personnel."
Communities in the Kootenays evacuated
The St. Mary's River fire has forced the evacuation of many homes near Cranbrook. It sparked on Sept. 1 near the ?Aq'am Reserve (formerly St. Mary's Reserve), about 14 kilometres northeast of Cranbrook.
The Regional District of East Kootenay says 174 properties near Moyie Lake were evacuated and more have been placed on evacuation alert.
An additional 36 homes in the ?Aq'am community have also been evacuated.
Joe Pierre, ?Aq'am chief, told CTV News that he was amazed at the quick response from local Cranbrook fire crews as well as wildfire firefighters.
"It only started yesterday [Friday] morning maybe around 10:30 a.m., and within an hour it had spread very quickly," he said.
St. Mary's River fire captured by Instagram user @nicolxfiona
The BC Wildfire Service estimates the fire at 3.9 square kilometres in size as of Saturday afternoon.
Pierre says the smoky conditions were cooling down what would usually be a very clear and hot day, but that conditions looked to be improving. He's hopeful that evacuees from ?Aq'am will be able to return home by the end of the weekend.
"We were actually pretty lucky in that we were able to find rooms for [the evacuees] in a number of different hotels," Pierre said. "It's been really amazing. All around we've been having calls offering help, offering refuge for horses and that kind of thing."
Several homes in the community have fire guards constructed around them, Pierre says. They haven't lost any houses that people live in, but two condemned empty houses have burned down.
Several human-caused fires started Friday
As of Saturday morning, there were 164 wildfires burning in B.C., and 12 of those fires started burning Friday. Of the 12 new fires, six were human-caused.
Turcot, the information officer with the BC Wildfire Service, says people need to be more careful.
"At this time of year, especially given what's already going on, even one human caused fire is too many," he said. "Human caused fires are completely preventable. They divert critical resources away from the wildfires"
The other major cause of wildfires is lightning—something that can't be prevented.
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Breanna Karstens-Smith and with files from The Canadian Press.
