Madison Erhardt
UPDATE: 11:50 a.m
It was a busy night for Mother Nature.
Thunder and lightning struck the region hard Wednesday night just before midnight.
Taylor McDonald, BCWS fire information officer, says there was a total of 1,213 lightning strikes at the Kamloops Fire Center last night.
“The fire started in the Lillooet fire zone, there is nothing in the Okanagan. A total of seven have started so far. We expect more,” McDonald said.
Just before the storm hit the region, BC Wildfire responded to multiple new wildfires in the Coastal Fire Center caused by lightning.
“With the support of firefighting aircraft, personnel are currently responding to 10 wildfires in the North and Mid Island fire zones,” BC Wildfire said in a tweet.
Neil McLaughlin, chief of forecasting services for the British Columbia Wildfire Service, says the lingering fires are a concern for crews.
“A good study would be where we have a lightning strike that’s associated with a thunderstorm, and maybe some of that rain that’s associated prevents that fire from growing and being detected right away, so we’ll typically see, that the fire pops out, two, maybe even three days later, he said.”
Environment Canada has issued a severe thunderstorm watch in effect for the Central, North and South Okanagan.
ORIGINAL: 10:55 am
The BC Wildfire Service is reporting seven new fires following last night’s thunderstorm.
Wildfire Information Officer Taylor Coleman said most of the dry lightning Wednesday night was in the Fraser Valley through the Fraser Canyon and near Lillooet.
Coleman said BCWS crews have found seven new fires in that area, all of which are currently at spot size and crews were working on them Thursday morning.
“There was also lightning in North Thompson and around Clearwater. But they got about 20 millimeters of rain up there with it, so no new fires were found there,” Coleman told Castanet Kamloops.
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