“Out of control” wildfires in central Newfoundland have led to a state of emergency declaration for the region – and two of the fires have been burning for weeks.
As of August 08, there were four active wildfires in central Newfoundland – with three out of the four classified as out of control, the NL Fisheries, Forestry, and Agriculture department reported. Those three fires are the ones located in Paradise Lake, Bay d’Espoir Highway and Southern Lake Access Road.
Jeff Motty, supervisor of forest protection for the NL government, explained that all three fires of note were caused by lightning. The supervisor also said that due to smoke management issues, the wildfire nearest to Bay d’Espoir Highway forced the thoroughfare to close. Said fire grew to 5,273 hectares wide over the weekend.
"We're doing our very best to try and get that Bay d'Espoir Highway open again, but the reality is the fire's on both sides of the road, the wind's not helping down there, and the size of the fire is increased,” Motty told CBC News.
Similarly, the Paradise Lake fire spread, increasing from 5,392 hectares to 6,614 hectares on Sunday.
“The major concerns with that one is that it reached the trigger point where we had to kind of put towns on notification that were within 25 kilometres of their municipality,” said Motty of the Paradise Lake fire in another interview with Global News.
Both the Paradise Lake and the Bay d'Espoir Highway fires have been burning for over two weeks.
Motty noted that while officials had concerns that the Paradise Lake and Bay d'Espoir fires would merge into one over the weekend, it thankfully did not come to pass. The forest fire duty officer added that the Paradise Lake fire is close to power transmission lines and had already jumped one of the lines.
NL Hydro confirmed that the fire had crossed two transmission lines from Bay d'Espoir, causing lines to trip. However, both lines were re-energized, and the trip did not cause any outage for customers. The utility gave assurances that the lines have been in service since Saturday, but warned that fire increases the risk of a trip due to smoke and soot contamination
In addition to the state of emergency declaration, a ban on open fires was extended to cover the entire province of NL.
