There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.
Eddie Cochran was the first to have a hit with the song, and there have been others since then.
Many people would say you can’t get the summertime blues until you have summer, and that’s something that seems to have been in short supply in the region this year.
Maybe it’s changing. Last week saw some blue skies and sunshine, so maybe the season was just a little bit slow getting here.
The big thing we want to remind people of, though, is that while there may be no cure for the summertime blues, there are ways to alleviate the suffering of the summertime reds – otherwise known as forest fires.
So far this year, it’s been a quiet year across the province for fires, but that can change quickly.
A couple of regions to the north and south of 100 Mile House got off fairly lightly last week when some lightning storms went through. The storms that went through the Williams Lake area apparently didn’t start any fires, while the ones that went through the Okanagan started some fires, but the rains which accompanied them put almost all of them out quickly.
We can’t rely on Mother Nature to always keep an eye on us, though, so it’s up to us to make sure our firefighting crews don’t have any more work than necessary.
There is an open burning ban in the region, which means you can’t burn any stubble or grass, you can’t have two open fires going at the same time, and you can’t have a fire of waste, slash or other materials more than one metre square.
These rules may sound strict, but they’re in place for a reason. In hot, dry conditions, it doesn’t take much to start a fire, and when it hits the beetle-kill wood prevalent in much of the province, it burns fast, hot and hard.
How many people in this region remember the summer of 2003? That was the year Barriere, just north of Kamloops, was besieged by a fire which started when someone dropped a cigarette in some dry grass.
They turned back to put it out a second or two later, but it was too late.
It was only a second, but it meant a lot of work for firefighting crews and a lot of forest lost.
The goal, of course, is to prevent 100 per cent of human-caused fires, and allow the crews to concentrate on the ones started naturally. That goal sounds attainable, but human nature being what it is, it probably isn’t.
Somebody drops a match in the wrong place, somebody turns their back on their campfire at the wrong time, somebody flicks a cigarette butt through thier car window and it bounces into some dry grass.
It doen’t take much, but we can all do our best to make sure we aren’t the one who starts it.
