Devil's Head forest fire in 2020 (Photo submitted by Melissa Story)
Alberta is celebrating National Forest Week and the birthday of Alberta Wildfire’s mascot Bertie the Beaver, who turned 65 last week.
“It is fitting that Bertie’s birthday celebration falls during National Forest Week. I can’t imagine a better time to recognize the important legacy of one of our province’s longest serving wildfire prevention officers,” Todd Loewen, minister of forestry and parks, said at a press conference last Monday.
According to Loewen, Bertie was hand-drawn and designed by Walt Disney in 1958 to thank Alberta Wildfire for assisting film crews with nature documentaries filmed in the Kananaskis region around the time. Since Bertie’s inception, he’s been turned into a mascot and parades through communities throughout Alberta promoting wildfire prevention.
The national week comes on the heels of a historic wildfire season that saw many communities temporarily evacuated and left Alberta under a blanket of smoke.
When it comes to how next year’s season could play out, both with wildfires and smokey conditions, Loewen said that “we’ll have to see how things go with the weather in the future.”
“We had a really bad fire season this year. When we have these situations with wildfires to the extent we’ve had this year, then we expect there’s going to be smoke. With the smoke we have now from B.C and the Northwest Territories, it depends on which way the wind is blowing. We can expect if we have bad fire seasons like this, we’re going to have bad smoke,” Loewen said.
Listen to the on-air audio with Todd Loewen below:
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