Cypress County Fire Chief Jason Linton speaks to CHAT News on Monday. Bob Schneider/CHAT News

By Jesse Gill

EMERGENCY SERVICES

Cypress County fire advisory date no longer guaranteed by end of March

Feb 24, 2025 | 8:00 PM

Cypress County won’t be going into an automatic fire advisory at the end of March, as opposed to past years.

Council changed the bylaw that was in place during its last meeting.

Fire Chief Jason Linton, said that the former bylaw had at minimum a fire advisory in place between March 31 and Oct. 31, which was a best guess time frame.

Special approval from the county will no longer be needed to deviate from it.

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Linton adds that the change gives them more discretion on when they should and shouldn’t put fire advisory, bans or restriction in place.

With information now available through Alberta Wildfire and the Government of Alberta giving them data to make decisions.

“In the past, the non forest protection areas, Cypress County and a lot of counties in the middle of southern Alberta were not under the forest protection area. So there was no data for us,” Linton said.

“Since all the wildfires, us as fire chiefs has asked Alberta Wildfire if they could include us in their daily information, daily updates include us for fire hazards and what they recommend,” he added.

“We’re using government of Alberta information now to to do our decision making, or at least part of it, with input from landowners, moisture content and a few other things as well.”

Linton is unsure if an advisory could be in place sooner, or later than past years.

A fire advisory means all fire permits are canceled and no new ones are enacted in the county. A fire restriction means that only burn barrels and recreational fires can be left.

With a fire restriction meaning there’s no active fire except for pre approved fireplaces inside hamlets within Cypress County.

He says there is lots of snow in Medicine Hat, but in the prairie right now, there’s almost no snow left in the fields, which is quite alarming.

“When this bylaw got approved I thought we’d be maybe having a later fire advisory,” Linton said.

“At this point, we’re going to monitor it very closely,” he added.

“The MD of Taber had a grass fire Sunday, so even though the ground might be wet, we could have a surface fire on the very tops of the grass.”

The county would also like to remind those who are applying for fire permits that they need to wait for an approval email, which will only come back during business hours and not on a weekend.