As of Thursday, June 28, the Foster Lake wildfire is still listed as a wildfire of note by the BC Wildfire Service, as responders continue to battle the blaze near Fraser Lake.
Approximately 2 kilometres South of the Fraser Lake Airport Road, the wildfire, which was discovered on Wednesday, June 20, was reportedly caused by lightning after serious thunderstorms swept across British Columbia’s interior.
Currently sitting at 320.0 hectares in size, the active wildfire is around 40 per cent contained, per information from the BC Wildfire Service.
With the most recent update coming on June 28, the BC Wildfire Service states that machine guard is now around 95 per cent of the fire, while crews continue to make good progress.
It is anticipated that since three pieces of heavy equipment are working on completing the machine guard around the fire,100 per cent machine guard will be around the fire by this evening.
35 BC Wildfire Service firefighters are currently on the scene and an additional 20 contract firefighters on their way, as well as 1 helicopter being implemented in the firefighting process.
According to the BC Wildfire Service, crews are currently engaged in using black lining as a planned ignition strategy. Black lining reduces the fire spread potential by eliminating unburned forest fuels between a control line and the fire perimeter.
Additionally, black lining may bring the fires edge to some sort of natural boundary, like a body of water or rock outcropping, or to constructed boundaries like machine or hand guard.
These planned ignitions are only carried out when environmental conditions like weather, terrain, fuel loading and potential fire behaviour are favourable, with the BC Wildfire Service stating that there may be increased smoke in the area due to these planned ignitions.
Luckily, the Foster Lake fire has reportedly been quiet for the last few days, with observations from the field stating that a small amount of smoke is visible with few isolated hot spots within the fire perimeter.