The heat wave that started a week ago has already caused the death of at least 500 people in Canada, whose armed forces were on alert this Saturday (07.03.2021) to help evacuate cities and fight more than 170 fires of forests in the west of the country.

At least 177 fires were burning in the western province of British Columbia, including 76 in the past two days, officials said. Most were caused by lightning.

“Yesterday (Friday) we saw about 12,000 lightning strikes,” said Cliff Chapman, director of operations for the BC Fire Department, according to public television CBC.

Lisa Lapointe, the forensic director of British Columbia, the region hardest hit by the “heat dome” that began to hit Canada’s Pacific coast on June 25, pointed out that the number of sudden deaths recorded the last week already stands at 719.

Lapointe explained that this figure is three times higher than what is normal for this period, so nearly 500 deaths are a consequence of the heat wave which raised the province’s thermometers to numbers never seen before, like 49.6 degrees Celsius in the interior of British Columbia. Colombia.

“It is considered likely that the extreme weather conditions that British Columbia has experienced over the past week have been a significant contributing factor to the increased death toll,” Lapointe said in a statement.

From 3 to 500 deaths in five years

But the province’s forensic director added that the figure will continue to rise in the coming days as information is updated, as many of the deceased are elderly people who lived alone in homes without air conditioning or who weren’t. They were prepared for high temperatures.

To understand how unusual and extreme weather conditions have been on Canada’s Pacific coast over the past week, Lapointe pointed out that there have only been three heat-related deaths in the province over the past few weeks. last five years.

The “heat dome”, as the meteorological phenomenon is called consisting of a mountain of hot air which “got stuck” in the upper layers of the atmosphere and caused not only hundreds of deaths but also fires and the overflow of rivers.

This Saturday’s data from the British Columbia Forest Fire Service indicates that over the past week there have been 245 fires, 76 of which have started in the past two days.

113,000 flashes

Nearly 70% of fires were caused by lightning strikes that found the dry conditions ideal for starting wildfires. In the 15 hours between Wednesday and Thursday, 113,000 lightning strikes were detected in British Columbia.

One such fire is the one that has consumed the entire small town of Lytton in recent days, where thermometers reached 49.6 degrees, a new all-time temperature record for Canada.

jc (efe, afp)