Posts falsely claim Alberta wildfires stop at national park
- Published on August 14, 2024 at 23:37
- 5 min read
- By Gwen ROLEY, AFP Canada
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"I find it interesting that there have been no fires in Wood Buffalo National park this year," says an August 12, 2024 post on X. "It's like there's a magic boundary protecting the park."
The post includes what appears to be a screenshot of the Alberta Wildfire Status Dashboard with a circle showing a lack of activity in Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories (archived here).
The post accumulated more than 4,000 likes, and versions sharing the same screenshot and captions spread on Facebook.
In 2023, social media users repeatedly claimed arsonists set Canada's record-breaking wildfires in an attempt to dramatize the effects of climate change.
Some responses to the 2024 Alberta wildfire map similarly allege blazes have only appeared in accessible areas because bad actors are lighting them. The August 12 post claims there are "no roads" in Wood Buffalo National Park, bolstering the conspiracy theory.
But the map shared on social media does not provide a complete record of all fires in the province -- national parks fall under the jurisdiction of the federal agency Parks Canada and may not appear on the fire tracking tool.
"We don't put things on our dashboard unless we've assigned resources to it," said Alberta Wildfire Information Officer Melissa Story on August 13. "So, unless we have folks that are on the ground fighting the wildfire from Alberta Wildfire, then it wouldn't show up."
Wood Buffalo status
Spanning more than 4.5 million hectares of forest, wetland and prairie, Wood Buffalo is the largest national park in Canada, according to the UNESCO World Heritage Convention website (archived here).
Wood Buffalo has its own fire status dashboard, which shows there have been 26 wildfires in the park this year (archived here). Many are holdover fires and none were considered out of control as of August 14.
The park has also reported wildfire activity on its Facebook page.
Local media reported the region's extreme drought is forcing firefighters in Wood Buffalo to adapt some of their techniques.
AFP contacted Parks Canada for comment, but a response was not forthcoming.
No roads?
Claims that there are no roads in Wood Buffalo are also false.
Parks Canada reports the conditions for various paved, gravel and dirt roads in the park (archived here).
While no roads appear to run through the park in Alberta on Google Maps (archived here), Highway 5 cuts across the section of Wood Buffalo in the Northwest Territories (archived here).
Google Maps also shows the unincorporated community of Garden River about five kilometers (3.1 miles) within the park's boundary at the end of a Highway 58 extension in Alberta (archived here and here).
Mutual aid exceptions
In late July 2024, a massive wildfire ripped through Jasper National Park in the southwestern corner of Alberta, triggering the evacuation of thousands of people from the park and a nearby tourist town.
Unlike Wood Buffalo, the status of the fire in Jasper does appear on the provincial dashboard because Alberta Wildfire is providing support there.
"If they do require some assistance they'll usually reach out on a local level, and we may go and drop a helicopter bucket on a fire or something like that," Story said.
According to the Alberta Wildfire Status Dashboard, 44.6 percent of wildfires in the province so far in the 2024 season are suspected to be human-caused (archived here).
Story said that while investigations take time, the number of arson-caused fires is estimated to be similar to the five-year average of five percent.
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation in Canada here.
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