Officials preach importance of social media during wildfire season

MERRITT – Wildfires are raging throughout the country, with the 2023 fire season already Canada’s fourth-worst on record, local officials give tips on how to help in your own backyard.

“It’s a great opportunity to roll up the sleeves, dig up some leaves, get rid of all the dead and dying decay from the winter,” said Krista Minar, Emergency Management Coordinator with Merritt Fire Rescue.

As of June 8, there are 81 active wildifres in B.C. and Merritt Fire Rescue doesn’t want to see that number grow anywhere near the Nicola Valley.

“It’s still a really good opportunity for residents to start applying their fire smart principals,” added Minar. “This is a great time of the season to get outside, take a look at your house, your roof, your eavestroughs and making sure that you don’t have vegetative litter in the gutters. Doing a 360 around your home and making sure that if a wildfire was to threaten the community, and we see embers making their way into the neighbourhood, that we are cognitive of where that collection of embers might be. For some people this may be the area around your home, where the road trash kind of collects, so often that’s in the corner of the home or along a fence line.”

Another big, often forgotten tip, officials give is paying attention to social media and the media.

“One of the things that we really want to encourage people to do, especially when we are seeing hot weather like this, we want people to be paying attention,” said Minar. “Listening to the radio, paying attention to social media sites, watching for BC Wildfire Services fire danger rating, which can give you an indication of kind of how quickly we expect a fire to start and spread.”

Right now, that fire danger rating is at extreme so if a blaze does break out, it has the potential to spread quickly, which is why keeping up to date and staying vigilant is one of the keys.

“Paying attention for folks is really important in the event that something does occur within the community.” explained Minar. “It’s really important people know which sources is safe and trusted, so following the City of Merritt website because we know that the municipal staff won’t be commenting on Facebook groups for example, so we don’t want people looking to sites where there is a possibility of misinformation. The other thing we really want to encourage people to do is register for Voyent Alert!, that is our massive notification alert system we have in the city so in the event that we had a wildfire threaten our community we would of course have first responders that would be going from home to home as best as they could if it was safe to do so but we would be absolutely using local radio, Voyent Alert!. Staying informed is really important and knowing what is the right information is really key.”