West Parry Sound’s Fire Danger Rating has been set to high.
This after a forest fire, located approximately 1 kilometer South of Point Au Baril and on the West side of Hwy 69, was confirmed on Sunday afternoon.
Isabelle Chenard, Fire Information Officer with the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Aviation, Forest Fire and Emergency Services, says after reports of smoke from people traveling through the area, three Ontario Fire Ranger crews were dispatched and are currently still on-scene.
“The crews made excellent progress to establish the hose line around the entire perimeter of the fire. It has been called being held as of late this morning. The fire is 1 hectare in size,” she says.
The region’s Fire Coordinator Gord Harrison says it’s not surprising for the Fire Danger rating to be high this far into the Fall season.
“We’re into a really warm weather [pattern]. We’ve gone over a week now without rain, so things are getting dry and there’s no rain in the foreseeable future. So high is definitely the appropriate fire danger rating for this for this time,” he says.
Harrison says the main cause of fires during this season is “people letting campfires get away from them.”
“What we do right now is we don’t issue burning permits. If you want to burn large amounts of debris, leaves, that sort of thing, we don’t allow that in Carling and that’s similar in most jurisdictions. We start to take those precautions and we just hope we don’t get thunderstorms,” he says.
Harrison is also reminding everyone that Thursday is smoke alarm day in Ontario.
“The fire service is really promoting smoke alarms. That’s your first offense against firing your home to in order to get your family out safely. Everybody should be testing their smoke alarm on Thursday just to make sure that everything’s working. You could just press your button. There’s a test button on every smoke alarm, so just test that, make sure it’s going, and if need be, check your battery again just to make sure it’s all good,” he says.