The Beast remains a burden for Alberta in 2017
Wildfire season began March 1
It’s wildfire season again in Alberta, but all the preparations and planning will be haunted by last year’s devastating fire in Fort McMurray.
Whether it’s lessons learned from the fire, simmering anger from residents in the city or the sheer cost of recovery, the province will be carrying The Beast’s burden into 2017.
Agriculture Minister Oneil Carlier said earlier this week he’s still waiting for reports on how the government handled the disaster, but he’s looking back on the province-wide effort to fight the Fort McMurray fire as the one-year anniversary approaches.
Carlier said he met firefighters who slept in the lunchroom so they could get back to their shift more quickly and volunteers who worked tirelessly on the relief effort.
“Their hard work was an inspiration to all of us. They went over and above to protect their community and protect their neighbours and friends,” said Carlier.
The season officially started March 1, a month earlier than it used to be, which allowed fire crews to start getting equipment ready, do some last-minute recruiting and prepare the airbases and towers.
At a crucial point in fighting last year’s fire, water bombers were turning their planes around in 11 minutes before climbing up over the flames to drop another payload.
A single company — Alberta’s Air Spray — dropped one million litres of fire retardant on the area in the first month, and firefighters worked around the clock. It still wasn’t enough.
In the words of Paul Lane, Air Spray’s chief operating officer, the fire was “beyond resources.”
“Mother Nature taught us all a lesson there,” Lane said Tuesday.
Chad Morrison, a senior manager in Alberta’s fire prevention department, said he’s hopeful that it will be a different spring this year.
“We’re fortunate to have a bit of cooler weather and some rain right now, but that doesn’t mean we let our guard down,” said Morrison. “We’re always making sure we’re ready to go if the weather turns around and it becomes hot and dry.”
The government took some criticism last year after Air Spray complained its contracts had been reduced from 123 days to 93 days, but Carlier said those contracts have been restored. Lane said 2016 was a busy year even before the Fort McMurray wildfire started, with pilots in the air as early as mid-April.
After the Slave Lake fire in 2011, where Lane said conditions were as extreme as he has ever seen, the company beefed up its training program. Pilots do weeks of ground training before reconditioning training gets them back in the planes after the long winter layoff. A new simulator program put pilots in harrowing situations, with increased smoke levels and multiple engine failures, so they can train for the worst-case scenarios in a virtual world.
The training started in midMarch and should be wrapping up soon, along with routine maintenance on the planes, in preparation for another early start to wildfire season. Each of the three Air Spray teams operating this year in Alberta is made up of five people — a pilot, a co-pilot, a “bird dog pilot” who scouts the fire and two ground crew — plus an air attack officer from the provincial government.
The province’s base wildfire budget is $133 million, which covers training, opening air tanker bases and towers, prevention and detection of wildfires and hiring seasonal staff. The government covers any extra firefighting and relief costs with a disaster fund. That fund started with an initial unallocated budget of $200 million and it’s now forecast to be $1.4 billion for 2016-17.
Wildrose Leader Brian Jean said the government needs to take a lesson from Alberta businesses and be more realistic about how it budgets the disaster funding. Jean, who lives in Fort McMurray, hopes the government has learned a lesson from the fire, which destroyed 2,400 buildings in the area, including his own home.
“There’s a lot of questions that need to be asked,” he said. “They have policies in place that allow
fires right now to continue to burn, a controlled burn. What in the world are they doing trying to do controlled burns five kilometres from my city?”
Carlier said the wildfire is on his mind a lot and he expects it’s the same for most Albertans.
Seventy per cent of the wildfires in the province are caused by humans and are preventable, he said.