Thank you, Madam Chair. As we’ve all seen in the last few days here, it’s been quite hot and dry, and the southern half, especially, of the Northwest Territories is in that situation. We are more than likely a week to two weeks ahead of schedule in terms of the fire season. We ended up bringing on some of our crews and our tankers a week before schedule. Today we have all our tankers, aircraft and crews. All our resources are on strength at this time, and this current trend, this high pressure system we’re sitting under is forecasted to take us at least into mid-June with above normal temperatures.

We just had a bit of a lightning outbreak yesterday and four fires as a result of that. We’re experiencing fairly severe fire behaviour already and very early in the season, the end of May. That’s unusual and three of the fires that started last night were south of Behchoko. The community is safe. They had two previous burns before in the previous years. The latest two years ago and the latest update before I came over, there was three fires joined and they’re roughly around 800 or 900 hectares. There’s one more fire that’s close to the community of Gameti. We’re assessing it at this time.

Again, we’re heading into the prime time. We’re earlier than normal fire season, with severe burning conditions. Usually we’re good until middle of July, third week of July before things start slowing down, but again, many of our indices are higher than normal for this time of year.