KENORA – The weather has helped out, but evacuation orders remained in place Tuesday for areas affected by the Kenora 20 and Kenora 14 wildfires.
“Lower temperatures and wet weather has reduced both the wildland fire hazard and fire behaviour of the region’s active fires,” said Chris Marchand, regional fire information officer for the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry.
Rainfall hasn’t been “sufficient to completely turn around the situation that we were in around this time last week,” he said, but “the cool weather has afforded us some time to get firefighting resources into the places where work needs to be done.”
Marchand said Kenora 20, the 31,000-hectare wildland fire west of Wabaseemoong Independent Nations, is still dangerous and an evacuation order remains in place for it and Kenora 14, a smaller forest fire north of Wabaseemoong.
More than 200 firefighters are on the ground for those blazes and “taking advantage of less fire activity to make progress near communities and other built-up areas,” he said.
“In the coming days, we expect to have an infrared scan of the entire fire area, and that will help us to find and extinguished hotspots so that they won’t reemerge under drier conditions.”
An evacuation alert for communities threatened by Fort Frances 4, a wildfire east of Atikokan, was lifted on Sunday.
Marchand said fire crews have “suppressed that fire to a degree that it’s no longer posing a concern to life or properties or infrastructure in that area.
“Fort Frances 4 is still classified as not under control, though that’s not really a reflection of the fire behaviour so much as an indication that it’ll just require more firefighting … to extinguish any remaining hotspots.”
Wabaseemong, a Treaty 3 community 120 kilometres northwest of Kenora, was evacuated last week as the Kenora 20 and Kenora 14 fires raged nearby.
More than 800 Wabaseemoong residents have been brought to Niagara Falls and are staying in hotels near each other, Chief Waylon Scott told reporters Sunday, while others are staying in Kenora and Winnipeg.
