As the Bald Ridge wildfire near Summerland, B.C., continues to burn, many Canadians may be wondering how the devastating blaze has been able to spread so quickly.
Starting about 15 km northwest of Summerland last Friday, the Bald Ridge wildfire quickly grew to 50 square kilometres in just three hours after it was first detected, according to local authorities.
The entire Summerland district was forced to evacuate in the early hours of Saturday morning just after midnight, with more than 10,000 more homes under alert. Nearly 22,000 people total had to evacuate from their homes, with a provincial state of emergency being declared on Saturday.
As of Monday, the fire has grown to 156 square kilometres, with most parts of southern B.C. being under yellow and orange air quality warnings as smoke permeates in the air.
“It was absolutely shocking to see that fire in Summerland go from an ignition and then spread to a thousand hectares within an hour or so, 5,000 overnight and 10,000 within 24 hours,” Lori Daniels, Kerner Chair at the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence at the University of British Columbia said.
“I think that’s most rapid fire spread that we’ve ever witnessed in the southern interior of B.C., for sure.”
‘Hurricane-style winds’ affecting spread
Cliff Chapman with the B.C. Wildfire Service said on Saturday that the conditions in that region of British Columbia right now “are explosive.”
“When we see a fire start, when we see the smoke lift, we are going to be challenged and we may see fires do what we saw on this fire last night,” he said at the time.
“I cannot stress enough that the conditions we are facing right now are conditions that we have never seen before.”
Daniels stated that the trajectory of the wildfires’ spread has not followed a typical path.
“It started up on the hill and we typically would expect fire to burn upslope; the heat rises, it warms and heats the forest adjacent […] more on the upslope side than the downslope or downhill side, so you’d expect fire to move upslope,” she said.
“But the winds in this case were coming very strongly from the west and it pushed that fire down the hill and through the valley, and because of the shapes of the mountains there, it’s kind of channelled that wind and the fire. So, it came down through the valley and then it kind of exploded out as it got closer to Okanagan Lake.”
As a result, Daniels said that the winds are “approaching kind of a low-grade hurricane-style winds that are pushing these fires.”
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Environment Canada states that wind is currently blowing north in B.C. at 20 km/h, gusting to 40km/h into the afternoon and overnight.
In addition, the elevated heat in the area can play a role in how fast winds pick up.
“When there is a heated surface, what happens is the wind speed rises. If there is a forest area where the initial wind is 20 to 30 km/h, but immediately when the fire spreads and the surface becomes warmer and warmer, this wind can reach as high as 40 to 50 km/h with dust,” said Tanzina Mohsin, an associate professor of climate technology at the University of Toronto.
“This could be one of the causes of the Summerland fires spreading so quickly.”
Droughts in B.C. coming into play
The fires across B.C. are occurring at a time when “fires are coming on the shield of prolonged droughts,” according to Daniels.
The province of B.C. defines a drought as “a naturally reoccurring period of abnormally dry conditions that may result in water scarcity or other adverse impacts on people, aquatic ecosystems, wildlife or vegetation.”
“The last 10 summers, we’ve [B.C.] had these extremely long droughts, multi-year droughts really drying out these ecosystems,” Daniels explained.
“When you get the heat domes, we’ve seen them in different parts of Canada and it’s a pattern all across Canada. You get a heat dome, record-breaking temperatures, very dry conditions, and then what happens is when that heat dome and that weather system breaks down, it brings with it very windy, turbulent conditions that create the thunderstorms and the lightning.”
Daniels added, “If you don’t get a bunch of rain, but you get thunder and lightning on top of drought, you have the prime conditions for literally tens to hundreds of fires to be ignited simultaneously.”
In addition, Katrina Eyvindson, associate professor and departmental chair of geography and environment at Western University, told Global News that the snowpack in B.C. was “low,” which played a role in the development of the wildfires in the province.
“Temperatures are high and there has been little rain making fuels particularly dry. Dry fuels make it easy for fires to start easily and spread quickly,” she said.
Are there lessons other provinces should take?
While the specific causes of the Bald Ridge wildfire are still unclear, Eyvindson said the key lesson of the last few years of challenging wildfires is “that climate change is here and will affect all of us.”
“Directly — for example, losing a home or being evacuated — or indirectly, in areas far from the fire where air quality has been reduced by smoke, to me the effects of fires should be a reminder that climate change will affect all of us, and therefore we all need to work together to find solutions,” she said.
Mohsin also said climate change is “changing the environmental background in which Canadian fires offer these days.”
“High temperatures increase evaporation and contributes to fuel drying and then while Canadian fire season become longer, we can see that all these contributing.”
Across Canada, there have been 620 wildfires in 2026, according to Natural Resources Canada.
Natural Resources Canada has linked escalating wildfires to “record high temperatures and widespread drought conditions across the country.”
The challenges demonstrated in the latest fire carry lessons for Canadians across the country, experts say.
“The situation in northwestern Ontario or Nova Scotia or Quebec is different, but all these areas are warming and they have different types of forest practices, different types of forests and things, but I think it’s just a warning that our climate is changing and that means that things that were quite rare before, like wildfires are becoming more common,” said Kent Moore, atmospheric physics professor at the University of Toronto.
Daniels believes that, “if we have forest and trees near us now in Canada,” people in the country are “susceptible” to evacuations and wildfire effects.
“It’s really having people understand how vulnerable we are and really choose to make those changes,” she said.
“We really need to approach this as an all of society problem and an all-of-society solution.”
