Wildland fire disasters across Canada and globally are increasing in frequency. Alberta’s spring wildfire season is a particularly challenging period. Situational awareness of the wildfire environment is critical for wildfire management agencies to be prepared when extreme events occur. We propose the use of simple initial attack (IA) and being held (BH) escape surveillance charts in near-real time with thresholds as tools for enhancing and tracking situational awareness. Since the discrete data sets we used are zero-inflated and over-dispersed we chose to model the exceedances over a threshold. We also used preceding December sea surface temperatures (SST) of the Pacific Ocean as an indicator of persistent spring wildfire activity. Our analysis indicates the tracking of IA and BH escapes and SST can provide additional decision support as part of an early warning system of spring wildfire risk.