Nogah Creek Wildfire grows to 2,000 hectares 

FORT NELSON, B.C. — The Nogah Creek wildfire has grown to 2,000 hectares, according to the BC Wildfire Service. 

The fire, a holdover from 2023, began to burn out of control again on Wednesday. Last year, the fire burned a total of 74,685.7 hectares.

Pedro Roldan-Delgado with the Prince George Fire Centre told Energeticcity that the fire reignited earlier this week after it had smouldered underground for the winter. 

He says the blaze, located roughly 60 kilometres east of Fort Nelson, is being actively monitored. 

“When I say, ‘monitored,’ we do have several tools to monitor our holdover fires,” Roldan-Delgado explains. 

Per BCWS’ spring outlook, the fire service defines holdover fires as “wildfires that burn overwinter, often underground, and have the potential to resurface as conditions warm and dry.”

“We do use infrared scanning and satellite imaging. They can detect and monitor fire behaviour and growth. As well, depending on resource availability, we can use wildfire staff to monitor the fires from the ground, fixed-wing, or rotary-wing aircraft.”

Those monitoring systems, Roldan-Delgado says, allow firefighters to respond quickly when holdover fires reignite and become out of control again.

Most holdover fires are listed as “under control” on the BCWS website, but Roldan-Delgado says at least one other holdover reignited this week — the 0.5-hectare Patry Creek wildfire north of Fort Nelson.

It was announced Thursday morning that an incident management team from the Prince George Fire Centre is moving to establish a command centre in Fort Nelson as the wildfire risk increases.

“An incident management team is a team that gets sent out for emergency management and response throughout our province,” Roldan-Delgado explains.

“They do follow the ICS, which is ‘incident command system,” so, within that, the incident management team consists of command, operations, planning, logistics, finance, and administration.”

Roldan-Delgado says an incident management team’s primary job is to set and assess long-term fire suppression goals for the region.

“They’ll help [BCWS staff] by taking an area off their plate, so they can start working on certain fires of note, and they’ll be the ones who would be calling in the resource requests and actioning the fires or seeing what we need to action those fires.”

No evacuation orders or area restrictions are currently in effect as a result of the Nogah Creek wildfire.

According to Roldan-Delgado, there’s no immediate threat to any structures in the area. However, he says there are oil and gas sites nearby and that firefighters are doing a flyover to assess the situation.

Energeticcity will update this story with new information as it becomes available.