Help is on its way for at least a small handful of the 1,300 firefighters working the 86 wildfires currently burning across the province.
The BC Wildfire Service has put in a request for an incident management team from the United States.
BCWS spokesperson Cliff Chapman said that team is expected to arrive by the weekend.
Speaking during a media briefing on the wildfire situation in the province Wednesday, Chapman said the arriving crew will replace one of the six incident management teams employed by BCWS.
He says the 20-person U.S. crew will be put onto one of the priority fires.
"It will give us the opportunity to rest one of our own incident management teams," said Chapman.
"Our teams are going on their second or third tour or duty already this year which is abnormal."
Chapman indicated those crews are typically not deployed until July or August.
Incident management teams are not ground firefighters but rather a team that oversees firefighting operation for a specific fire.
"We have put requests in for the next two weeks for additional firefighting capacity. We are looking at potentially 100 firefighters, but that is weather and resource dependent."
Chapman says that request can be cancelled if the situation requires.
At the present time, he says the province does have sufficient resources.
With fires burning right across the country, there are not many resources available to draw from in Canada.
Chapman says requests have been made internationally, to Australia, Mexico and the European Union.
But, he adds those requests have been made three to four weeks out anticipating a need to give provincial firefighters some rest in the event conditions do worsen.
There are presently 86 fires burning in the province including 13 that started in the past 24 hours.
Since the season officially began April 1, there have been 423 wildfires in the province accumulating 762,000 hectares of forest.
The 20 year average is 306 fires and 18,000 hectares at this point in the season.
