The OPP are keeping a close watch on Highway 69 on whether part of the Trans-Canada Highway should be closed because of forest fire smoke.
Constable Carmel McDonald, who is the Community Safety Media Officer with the Sudbury OPP, says there is no magic number or distance to determine if police need to close the roadway.
“The wind and humidity are factors and that will dictate how much smoke will come across the highway,” McDonald said.
McDonald says an OPP staff sergeant and acting inspector are on site monitoring the situation.
“If and when the smoke causes a traffic hazard and motorists aren’t able to see safely, then the highway will be closed,” she said.
McDonald says closing the highway is not a decision the OPP will make lightly and the decision will come from command.
“But the decision won’t take long,” said the constable.
“As soon as it’s a risk to public safety, the highway will be closed.”
McDonald says the problem area where smoke is involved starts around the Grundy Lake Provincial Park region, about an hour’s drive south of Sudbury.
McDonald says the smoke appears as light fog along the highway.
The advice from the OPP is for motorists to slowdown and to drive with their headlights and taillights on.
McDonald says if Highway 69 has to close, then traffic that would normally head south on the roadway will have to head on Highway 17 to North Bay and then continue the southbound journey by taking Highway 11.
Northbound motorists will have to first come up Highway 11 and when they hit North Bay, they take Highway 17 through the city and continue west toward Sudbury.
As of midnight Tuesday Parry Sound 33, the fire that’s resulted in the highway smoke, remained five kilometres west of Highway 69 but had grown to 10,139 hectares, which is an increase of more than 1,000 hectares since Monday.
Meanwhile the Municipality of Killarney has issued an evacuation order for its residents in the areas of Travers, Allen, Struthers, Kilpatrick, Bigwood (including Hartley Bay Road), a portion of Mowat, the Unsurveyed Area, 14 Mile Island and French River Provincial Park.
An evacuation alert remains in effect for residents in the Alban area meaning they have to be ready to leave at any time if the alert becomes an order.
There are 41 wildfires in the northeast, 13 of them are out of control.
