Wildfire in remote area of Cape Breton under control

A wildfire in a remote part of Cape Breton's Richmond County was under control as of Friday afternoon, a little less than 24 hours after it broke out.

The blaze started around 5 p.m. AT Thursday on Three Rivers Road in Framboise, about 66 kilometres southwest of Sydney.

As of 3 p.m. Friday, the wildfire was under control, according to the Natural Resources Department. That indicates the fire is completely contained within an established perimeter, is no longer growing or spreading, and is moving toward being extinguished. 

The fire reached about 15 hectares in size, spread over mostly wooded areas, and had crossed at least one roadway, the local municipality said.

No evacuation orders were issued.

One old trailer, vacant for over 20 years, was lost in the blaze. A residence was soaked down as a precaution and another had a sprinkler system set up.

Scott Tingley, manager of forest protection with the province's Natural Resources Department, said those two homes were the only ones in the vicinity of the fire and there was no imminent threat to properties.

He said there were 17 staff members from the department on scene, as well as roughly 12 volunteer firefighters.

Edie Strachan moved back home to Framboise just a few weeks ago and joined the Framboise-Forchu volunteer fire department just last week. She's already been called out to four fires and two of them were on Thursday.

"It's pretty scary right? We live in a small, remote community. The roads are horrible and it's dry and the fire was going up like matchsticks."

Strachan said the fire was more dramatic on Thursday night, but it was still a challenge on Friday.

"It is quite a large area," she said. "It goes across Stirling Road and out towards the old mine.

"There's probably more that I can't see visually from the roadside, but it was burning quite hot and quite long last night."

Volunteers from Framboise-Forchu, L'Ardoise and Grand River in Richmond County, Marion Bridge in Cape Breton Regional Municipality were among those fighting the fire.

They staged out of the Framboise community hall and worked with each other out in the field, loading water, pulling hoses and attacking hot spots.

"When things get big and out of hand like that, we need all the help we can get, and we're so grateful for our sister communities for showing up and supporting us," Strachan said.

Richmond County's emergency management co-ordinator Steve Marcellus said cool, damp weather on Friday was helping.

"It's allowing them to get into spots that they normally probably wouldn't," he said.

"Crews are making headway and they're doing the best they can with the hot spots and making sure that it's not growing at this time," he said.

Lois Landry, warden for the Municipality of the County of Richmond, said the area is quite rural and sparsely populated. She said cellphone service is not good, which is a concern when trying to communicate with emergency crews on the ground.

"There's efforts afoot to try to improve that but it's times like this really where that lack of service is really significant," Landry said in an interview Friday morning.

The province issued a fire ban for most of Nova Scotia on Thursday following several days of warm, sunny weather. There was a little reprieve from hot and dry conditions as rain fell in some areas overnight into Friday.

Overall, the wildfire season — which runs from March 15 to Oct. 15 — has been off to a slow start in Nova Scotia.

Tingley said the number of fires and the amount of hectares burned are both below average.

"We had a pretty cool, wet spring so far, so that has certainly helped kind of mitigate the conditions and the risk," Tingley said.

As of Thursday, 39 fires had burned about 35 hectares across the province. 

This past week, however, has heightened the risk due to hot and windy conditions, he said. There was also a small fire in West Gore on Wednesday evening that burned through about 1.5 hectares.

Tingley said in the two years since after the province's most devastating wildfire season on record, the Department of Natural Resources has implemented all the recommendations from a report about the department's response in 2023.

Some of those included updating equipment, renewing the helicopter fleet and improving internal communication procedures. He said the department has also worked on adding more personnel to the teams that deal with wildfires.

"That was a recognized gap and we've done a lot adding capacity to our ability to respond, particularly around incident management teams and getting more people trained to respond and support the efforts," Tingley said.

The wildfires of 2023 tore through areas of Shelburne County and the Upper Tantallon area just north of Halifax, destroying more than 200 homes and burning 25,000 hectares of forest. Last year, things shifted dramatically, with the province seeing its least active wildfire season on record, with 83 wildfires burning about 47.5 hectares of land.

Tingley said that could be due to residents changing their behaviour when it comes to burning. A fine of $25,000 was temporarily put in place to curb illegal burning in the province, and was made permanent earlier this month.