British Columbia’s turn:

About 30,000 households have been ordered to evacuate in Canada’s British Columbia province, where nearly 400 wildfires are raging.

Two huge fires in the Shuswap region merged overnight, destroying blocks of houses and other buildings. To the south, travel to the waterside city of Kelowna has been restricted, and smoke from nearby fires hangs over Lake Okanagan. Fires have charred homes in West Kelowna, a nearby city of 36,000.

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The province’s emergency management minister said officials “cannot stress strongly enough how critical it is to follow evacuation orders”. Bowinn Ma added: “They are a matter of life and death not only for the people in those properties, but also for the first responders who will often go back to try to implore people to leave.”

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Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC). Experts say climate change [aka global warming] increases the risk of the hot, dry weather that is likely to fuel wildfires. Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.

I’m familiar with that just from Seattle summers: the grass gets visibly (and touchably) dryer and more brittle as the rainless months add up. By September it’s like straw.