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By Mat Barrett

English Creek Wildfire

English Creek fire at 40,000 hectares, still uncontained

May 20, 2020 | 1:06 PM

The Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency (SPSA) has provided another update on the English Creek fire that started in the Fort à la Corne Provincial Forest.

As of Tuesday morning, the fire has grown to 40,000 hectares and remains uncontained. SPSA Acting Vice President of Operations Steve Roberts said when the fire first started, it was growing mainly northward, but since then, the winds have shifted.

“The fire has grown in probably every direction, depending on the day the winds are blowing,” he said. “Its primary growth has been eastward, in the last 24 hours it grew southward, sort of back towards the Saskatchewan river.”

Roberts said they believe progress is being made on the fire with fire guards up in numerous places around the fire and crews working to clear debris.

“And aerial ignition crews were burning out accumulation of fuel that we would be worried about igniting and threatening the fire guards,” Roberts told northeastNOW. “So we are continuing to make progress on containment of this fire.”

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The SPSA did not give an exact number on how much of the fire they have been able to contain.

Meanwhile, nearby Rural Municipalities in the area including the RM of Torch River and Garden River continue to be on alert. The RM of Garden River still has a wildfire alert in affect.

The James Smith Cree Nation was threatened a bit with smoke yesterday, but according to the SPSA, there has been no evacuation yet. There was consideration of evacuating some higher risk residents but they have instead been able to provide some assistance to limit the effect of the smoke coming into the community.

Roberts also talked about what it would take for an evacuation to be needed.

“Typically that would be either a prolonged smoke exposure, in which case that typically affects the high risk medical components of the community,” he said. “Or there would have to be a direct fire threat to the community itself, in which case, that would be a more widespread evacuation.”

In recent days, the fire also jumped into some of the neighbouring farmland in the area, and Roberts said today they are looking into how much farmland was actually damaged.

“Relatively it’s fairly little,” he said. “We’ve also had to contend with that there’s also farmers in the area, rancher that are doing burning of their fields at the same time. So it’s kind of confusing the issue when people see fire across the farmland, whether that’s a result of the fire or whether that’s ongoing spring burning practices to prep the fields for planting.”

Roberts added crews are still investigating the cause of the fire, but the SPSA did say yesterday that it was a man-made fire.

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mat.barrett@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @matbarrett6