Two forest fires are underway in Nunavik, in northern Quebec. According to the Société de protection des forêts contre le feu (SOPFEU) and Environment Canada, an early spring and dry weather created favorable conditions for their spread.
Posted at 12:04 p.m.
The largest, identified as fire 259 on the SOPFEU website, reached an area of nearly 4,500 hectares on Saturday morning. “It is not a fire on which we are going to intervene,” said Mélanie Morin, spokesperson for SOPFEU. “It’s common in northern Quebec, it’s a fire that threatens nothing in that area,” she explains.
The other, Fire 261, reaches 113 hectares, but prompted a smoke warning on Friday given its proximity to Kangiqsualujjuaq, a village of fewer than 1,000 people on the east coast of Ungava Bay.
According to Mme Morin, such blazes are not uncommon, “but this year, they had an early spring in that sector, so a very rapid snowmelt which means that it’s very dry at the moment”, in more light precipitation. “The conditions are there to have propagation [des feux] “, she observes.
“For the month of May, as for the southern regions, the northern regions felt the heat waves,” confirms Maxime Desharnais, meteorologist at Environment Canada. “It’s not abnormal, but it’s still unusual to have heat waves like that so early in the year,” he adds.
The region experienced “a positive anomaly of 1 to 2 degrees warmer than normal for the whole month”, he specifies, also noting that there was “much less precipitation than normal”.
Fire 259 was caused by industrial operations, according to SOPFEU. “These were operations to restore the place to its normal state. What I am told is that buildings were to be burned and the whole thing was dropped, ”explains Mme Morin, who is unable to identify the company involved.
The Kativik Regional Government (KRG) did not respond to questions from The Press on the origin of the blaze at the time of publishing this text. The cause of fire 261 remains to be determined.
In its latest report on the consequences of climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that “climate change has increased the incidence of hotter and drier conditions favorable to wildfires” in North America.