Fire officials in BC say the immediate danger posed by the Christie Mountain wildfire, near Penticton, is over. The blaze forced thousands of people to flee their homes, and many residents are still on high alert. Aaron McCarthur reports.
On Friday, evacuation tension was high, as the forecast called for afternoon winds. The fear was that the 2,000-hectare fire could grow and turn an evacuation alert for nearly 3,800 properties into an evacuation order.
Meanwhile, relentless heat and repeated dry lightning strikes sparked fires across California, stretching firefighters thin. As Jennifer Johnson reports, now fire crews from 10 other states, as well as Canada and Australia, are preparing to help in this historic wildfire for the state.
Australia, officially known as the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world’s sixth-largest country by total area.
California, a western U.S. state, stretches from the Mexican border along the Pacific for nearly 900 miles. Its terrain includes cliff-lined beaches, redwood forest, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Central Valley farmland and the Mojave Desert. The city of Los Angeles is the seat of the Hollywood entertainment industry. Hilly San Francisco is known for the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island and cable cars.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. It extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres (3.85 million square miles), making it the world’s second-largest country by total area.
Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world’s longest bi-national land border. Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Various Indigenous peoples inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years before European colonization. The Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British Parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with a monarch and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the Cabinet and head of government.
As a highly developed country, Canada has the seventeenth-highest nominal per-capita income globally as well as the thirteenth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index. Its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.
Lightning is a giant spark of electricity in the atmosphere between clouds, the air, or the ground. Lightning can occur between opposite charges within the thunderstorm cloud (intra-cloud lightning) or between opposite charges in the cloud and on the ground (cloud-to-ground lightning). (Source: NSSL)
