The fire pushes and firefighters push back
As Fire 9 pushed forward on May 4, 2016, threatening Fort McMurray’s most populous suburbs, exhausted firefighters made a stand at Birchwood Trails, calling in water bombers and eventually bulldozing homes to make ever-larger firebreaks in an effort to sa
At sunrise on Wednesday, May 4, 2016, Jody Butz went up in a helicopter to survey the damage from Fire 9’s initial assault.
Butz, Fort McMurray’s operations chief in charge of fighting the fire, feared both for what he was about to see and for what might come next.
Living in remote Fort McMurray, a city afloat in an ocean of boreal forest, Butz loved to get out in the wilderness. He’d spent time in the woods charred and scorched by the massive 2011 Richardson wildfire, north of the oilsands operations outside the city. That blaze consumed everything in its path for dozens of kilometres.
Butz now feared Fire 9 was doing the same, swallowing his city, about to consume everything. But what he saw from the helicopter cheered him. Yes, 60 per cent of the structures in a hard-hit neighbourhood like Abasand burned during that first wave of the fire on May 3, but against all expectations 40 per cent of the homes were still standing.
OK, we haven’t lost everything, Butz thought. He felt suddenly rejuvenated. Back at the Regional Emergency Operations Centre in Firehall 5 at the south end of the city, he settled in for what he knew would be the major test of this firefight, the battle to save Birchwood Trails.
The massive web of trails stretched six kilometres through a forest of thirsty aspen, dried grass and parched black spruce. Surrounding the trails were Fort McMurray’s most populous suburbs, Timberlea and Thickwood. If Birchwood burned, so would many of the 19,000 dwellings nearby.
The fire had burned into the early morning hours of May 4, taking it to the western entrance of Birchwood Trails. There, a slender wick of trees, two kilometres long and about 100 metres wide, ran from the boreal forest, running between two neighbourhoods into Birchwood’s still untouched main trails.
The area’s main road, Confederation Trail, intersected the wick. Butz realized the road acted as the key physical barrier between the wildfire and the trails. There, his firefighters would make their stand, he decided. He told his staff, “You do not let it cross that Confed.”
The fire slept under a blanket of smoke through the morning of May 4, but in the afternoon the temperature charged to its peak of 32 C.
For the second day, wind picked up from the southwest. By then, however, firefighters, engines and heavy equipment had poured into the city from across Alberta and from Fort McMurray’s oilsands operations. This gave Butz fresh eyes to monitor the empty city and rested hands to spray and dig out fires.
The out-of-town firefighters stayed at the recreation centre at MacDonald Island Park downtown. They lined up in their engines to get marching orders. Many of the Fort McMurray firefighters avoided the island. They didn’t want to get in the long line, then maybe get sent to some spot with little fire action at that moment. The locals wanted to go from severe fire to severe fire. This was their city, after all.
Many local firefighters went into ghost mode, as they called it, communicating with one another and a few trusted fire captains by text and cellphone to find where they were most needed.
Firefighters who had the jam and mindset to step up and lead did so, while others faded back. Your worth was measured not by seniority or job title, but by how many hours you were willing to put in and how smartly and fiercely you could battle the smoke and flames. Could you keep going? Because other firefighters were doing just that, even ones who had lost their own homes.
Exhaustion gripped one local firefighter, Keegan Thomas. He wanted to lie down to sleep, but he couldn’t stay down. He felt guilty and worried others would challenge him: Where were you? Where are you? What are you doing?
The firefighters cursed the fire but also their own management, wondering why there weren’t more supplies and support. Couldn’t someone at least bring them a sandwich and a pop?
Things got simple on the front lines, with the overriding issue starting to be whether or not firefighters could get dry socks to avoid foot infections from their soaked boots. Masks, helmets and bulky protective jackets proved to be too stifling in the heat of the day and flames, so the firefighters wore ball caps and coveralls.
All kinds of locals volunteered. One private contractor stepped up to pump water out of the Clearwater River into tanker trucks. This provided a secondary source of water that took pressure off the city’s main water system, which was severely taxed with dozens of fire trucks drawing on water from the hydrants.
With the afternoon’s increasing heat and wind, firefighters climbed on the roofs of homes in Thickwood and set up sprinklers. Embers bombarded the neighbourhood and Birchwood Trails.
Timberlea fire captain Matt Collins found several dozen golf carts at the burned out Fort McMurray golf course in working order. They rigged the carts with water barrels and used them to patrol and fight fires through the Birchwood and Thickwood area.
Fire captain Mike Woykin patrolled the Birchwood wick. Dozers worked to clear out trees in the forest west of town, but embers still wafted over Confederation Trail. A handful of spot fires ignited by mid-afternoon.
“It’s crossed,” Woykin told Butz over the radio.
A curse came in reply.
“Yeah,” Woykin said, but added ground crews were on the spot fires.
Butz told Woykin to get ready, that he was calling in water bombers.
At once Woykin headed into the trails, looking for the best place to drop.
The bird dog plane that acts as aerial observation flew overhead. Still, nothing happened, no water bombers. Butz called to tell Woykin the bombers were ready but didn’t know what to hit. Smoke obscured the ground.
Your worth was measured not by seniority or job title, but by how many hours you were willing to put in and how smartly and fiercely you could battle the smoke and flames. Could you keep going?
The tankers needed a target, Butz said, something that the bird dog plane could see from above, maybe a jacket. “Just get something.”
Woykin yelled at his crew and one of the team rushed to a pumper truck to fetch a red, six-by-six foot rescue blanket generally used to keep fire victims warm at night.
“Perfect,” Woykin said, then headed into the bush to place the target.
A moment after he and the other firefighters cleared the area, the bird dog’s siren sounded. It roared overhead, then came a run of four water bombers, which dropped their payload.
Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp! Whoomp!
At once the spot fires became more manageable. Woykin and his crew were able to put out all of them.
For now, Birchwood Trails was safe. Butz started to think that the worst of the day was over.
We’re winning here finally. This is good.
That feeling did not linger long. At 4:30 p.m. the winds suddenly whipped up and changed direction.
They now blew in at 25 to 30 km/h, the first taste of a massive high-pressure front charging in from the northwest. Fires blazed at once with a new fury. High over the crown of the fire, a pyrocumulus cloud formed to tower 7,600 metres into the sky, a weather system created by the heat of the fire itself. Lightning bolts shot out from the turbulent fire cloud, igniting spot fires many kilometres away.
North of the Athabasca River, winds blew Fire 9 through the forest along the edge of Timberlea. It again jumped the river, this time north of the city past the confluence of the Athabasca and the Clearwater, moving a full kilometre from the west to the east bank. The winds pushed fire up the Clearwater until the fire burned in the valley near the south Fort McMurray suburb of Gregoire and the Mackenzie industrial park, which was full of containers of propane tanks, chemicals and fuel. If a major tank detonated, that could start a chain reaction.
Then Fire 9 came at the Regional Emergency Operations Centre, located at the south end of the industrial park, both from the western boreal forest and also from the north. Massive plumes of smoke rose in both directions. Darby Allen and Dale Bendfeld, the two men tasked with managing the emergency, had no firefighters to protect the operations centre’s civilian staff. They also could not afford to have their operations team in flight, with no one in command. The prudent action was an orderly retreat to re-establish the operations centre in a safer place.
Allen and the operations centre’s deputy commander, Chris Graham, left in a convoy with the bulk of the staff to set up 40 km southwest at the Nexen Long Lake oilsands operation. Bendfeld and Butz remained at Firehall 5 with a skeleton crew to lead until the Nexen base was ready to give orders.
Darkness came that evening, but yet again the fire refused to relent. The main force of the highpressure front brought a fierce and steady wind, 45 to 50 km/h. In his truck, Woykin now patrolled Millennium Drive and Walnut Crescent, the main road between the forested ravine and the 13,000 homes of Timberlea, the city’s largest neighbourhood.
The street lights were off. Smoke filled the air, making it hard to see the road, let alone abandoned vehicles. Dark smoke covered the homes. The only way to see a fire was to spot a black plume of smoke rising out of the dark haze, then go and see what was happening.
I’m heading into the abyss, Woykin thought. The apocalypse.
Embers came down. House and spot fires ignited. One big house fire threatened to ignite more homes. Just then a large oil company fire truck pulled up.
“Yougotfoamonboard?”Woykin asked the crew leader, wondering if the truck was equipped with fire retardant. “Yeah, I got foam on board.” Woykin guided the truck to the blazing house, then pointed across the street at a row of untouched homes.
“OK, for the houses across the street, make it look like Christmas.” “What?” “Make it look like snow, just a blizzard of snow on those houses.”
It wasn’t something that was usually done to protect homes, but Woykin knew he needed to try unconventional measures to stop the rapid spread of flames in this wind.
Word came of a new trouble spot at Stonecreek in northeast Timberlea. When Capt. Matt Collins and his crew showed up, a number of houses were already blazing. Embers blasted in on the wind.
Numerous crews were dispatched to help until Collins had fire engines and crews from St. Albert, Slave Lake, Vegreville and Busby, all of their hoses trained on the wall of flame. The strong wind made the effort futile. Heavy machinery bulldozed a few burning homes to protect homes on the other side, but with the intensity of the heat and the wind, embers blew far past this fire break and ignited homes behind the firefighters, just as Collins had seen happen in Abasand. Only yesterday he had seen half that community burn.
The fire grew close to some major apartments and a shopping mall. How to stop it? How to avoid another Abasand?
Collins thought back to the great Chicago Fire of 1871, when dynamite had been used to take out buildings and rob the blaze of its fuel. He couldn’t get dynamite, but he did have bulldozers and track hoes. The only way to stop this fire was to build a much larger firebreak.
Collins spied a row of untouched homes next to the flames. He called in the dozers to flatten them and the track hoes to pack them down. Even as they took this action, flames swept into the area and threatened the heavy machinery. Collins turned all his hoses on the dozers and trackhoes to keep them from overheating.
At last, the heavy equipment completed the firebreak. And it worked, holding back the fire. Collins felt bad about squishing the homes, but it was the only thing he could do.
The Stonecreek area had lost 225 homes, but the area was now stabilized. Collins headed off to the next hot spot in this endless night of fire.
Lightning bolts shot out from the turbulent fire cloud,igniting spot fires many kilometres away.