By Lara Fominoff @fomsy1 on Twitter

South Castle area remains closed at this time due to wildfire risk

Sep 13, 2017 | 1:04 PM

PINCHER CREEK – Although there is no immediate threat to the Castle Mountain Resort area at this time, the south Castle region will remain closed for the foreseeable future, according to an update from Alberta Wildfire Officers who updated media at the MD of Pincher Creek Offices Wednesday morning.

While residents in the Twin Butte area may be allowed into their residences for up to two hours today (Sept. 13), no one is yet allowed back into the area around Beaver Mines or the Castle Park Resort.

Provincial Wildfire Information Officer Leslie Lozinski says the good news is, that the fire in the Castle area did not grow overnight.

“It’s still sitting at about 500 hectares. Last night the weather was really favourable for us. We had temperatures of about 10 degrees on the fire and humidity of about 50 per cent and very light winds. So that was very helpful. There was no precipitation on that fire last night though.”

Lozinski says they are ranking the fire today (Wednesday) as ‘rank 1-2’ meaning single trees are burning, as opposed to ‘rank 5-6’ for the last couple of days, with continuous crowning and flame walls.

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“This morning we’ve got medium aircraft in there bucketing on the south side of Sage Mountain,” she explains. “After the clouds lift, we’ll have a heavy helicopter in there this afternoon, and hopefully we’ll be able to get air tankers in there this afternoon.”

Lozinski says the northeast corner of the fire was active on the B.C. side overnight, so they are paying close attention to that area and strengthening their suppression efforts with heavy equipment putting containment lines in.

She says as of this morning, the fire is about 23 km away from the Castle Mountain Resort, and 30 km away from Beaver Mine.

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