A wildfire straddling the eastern boundary of Banff National Park along the David Thompson Highway has been brought under control and is currently being held in place.
The amount of smoke the Spreading Creek Fire is generating has dropped, Rick Kubian, resource conservation manager for the Lake Louise Yoho Kootenay Field Unit, said Wednesday (July 16).
“It was fairly smoky here two days ago, but in the last 36 hours it has been quite clear and no major issues from the fire,” Kubian said. “This fire here has contributed to the regional smoke, but it is one of several wildfires burning. It is hard to value if smoke in the Bow Valley is from this one, or there’s a big one burning in B.C. on the east side of Kinbasket Lake.”
Joesph Gorzeman, wildfire information officer with the province, in an email to the Outlook Tuesday added a fire in the Northwest Territories and other fires in Alberta are contributing to smoke in the Bow Valley.
A lightning strike ignited the Spreading Creek wildfire on the BNP border in early July, according to Parks Canada. The fire became “very active” in the park on Friday (July 11) and by Saturday, in BNP, Kubian said Parks Canada fire crews had the fire in a containment zone bounded by the North Saskatchewan River, a rocky creek drainage on Mount Murchison and a two-kilometre section of Highway 93 North.
“We did an aerial ignition on Saturday afternoon to bring the fire to good containment lines that we could safely work with our crews and since we brought it there on Saturday afternoon the fire has not spread any further, so we’ve had success in that we brought it to these containment lines we think are favourable and we have held it at those containment lines since Saturday,” Kubian said Wednesday.
Kubian said Parks Canada evacuated The Crossing Resort, which is located on the north side of the river at the junction with Highway 11 on Thursday, but allowed the resort to re-open Friday morning. The Saskatchewan Crossing warden station was not affected.
Highway 93 North remains open but Kubian said the best time to travel is between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. After 2 p.m., he added that the highway may close at any time for any length of time, depending on the fire activity.
“Each day we try to keep it open for as long as we can. The two o’clock timeline is really about fire behaviour, that’s when fire behaviour tends to pick up. It’s not out of the question that we would close it before two o’clock, but we haven’t yet and we’ve worked really hard to maintain it as open as we can,” he said.
Gorzeman said both Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development and Parks Canada are working closely together in a mutual aid situation.
“Although we both have firefighters working under different jurisdictions we are very much working together and sharing resources as needed,” he stated.
On the provincial side of the boundary, Gorzeman said the strategy has been to extinguish it as safely and as quickly as possible.
“We are in no way letting this fire burn … This wildfire is classified as being held, which means given current weather conditions, we don’t anticipate this fire to grow beyond our pre-determined boundaries. We have achieved this by heavily using our helicopters to bucket water on the intense parts of the fire where it is impossible for ground crews to access safely, while utilizing natural fire barriers like rivers, and topography to help guide the fire to where it can be extinguished the most effectively and the safest.”
