Fire spares Waterton, but rips through park
PINCHER CREEK It was the scenario everybody prepared for but hoped would never happen.
Lashing at the western boundaries of Waterton Lakes National Park since Friday, the Kenow wildfire’s devastating journey across the continental divide tore a fiery path through the beloved southwestern Alberta park — mercifully sparing much of the townsite but breaking north along the entrance highway.
Fed by grasses withered brown by a hot and dry summer, the blaze set alight the visitors centre just north of the townsite before moving north to the park entrance gate along Highway 6.
From there, the fire spread out along Highway 6 in both directions — east into Cardston County and the Blood reserve, and west into the Municipal District of Pincher Creek.
It is a fire that deputy chief of Pincher Creek emergency services Pat Neumann said is behaving in ways he’d never seen before.
“It was really something,” he said. “It was so risky ... even just being near the fire — well, you just couldn’t.
“It was running over highways; there were 40-foot (12-metre) flames in some places, you could see it running up the sides of mountains and across fields.”
Pincher Creek was joined by fire crews from Cardston Monday night when calls about the fire came in. Realizing what they were facing, they were joined by RCMP and park wardens from Waterton knocking on doors of properties within the danger zone and ordering them to safety.
Initially established near Township Road 3-0 about six kilometres north of the Waterton park boundary, swiftly advancing flames prompted emergency crews to keep moving the line another 10 kilometres north to the tiny hamlet of Twin Butte. That was again moved a little after 1 a.m. to Highway 505, where the evacuation zone currently stands.
As the sun rose Tuesday morning, a fleet of water bombers began a ceaseless aerial attack on the flames, by then burning along the eastern edges of the Castle Wildlands, prompting more evacuations.
“We’ve still got fire burning east and west of Highway 6, north of the Waterton park boundary ... as far as Township Road 3-0,” Neumann said Tuesday afternoon.
“What the fire does is ‘finger out’ — it’s not like a field fire that burns an entire field. What you get are fingers that run out and kinda sneak in behind things — the only way to fight it is get up and fly, and use thermal (imaging) to track down exactly where that fire extended to.”
While no official damage statistics were available at press time, property and homes were damaged and even destroyed in the fire.
Meanwhile, inside Waterton, 60 firefighters from six southern Alberta fire departments worked all night to protect the townsite from flames and a ceaseless shower of burning embers blown onto homes and buildings.
Firefighters from both Calgary and Taber had the daunting task of protecting the venerable Prince of Wales Hotel, a wood-framed structure as flammable as it is majestic.
Calgary fire Chief Steve Dongworth described a hectic night facing down the massive blaze.
“To me, watching the fire coming down the valley at pace would have been very intimidating, and when the fire did arrive, it was very close,” he said, noting the crew worked in excess of 24 hours. “The building is unscathed to the best of my knowledge.”
The hotel’s location, surrounded by grassland instead of forest, also helped keep it safe, said the chief.
Calgary crews were able to quickly snuff flying embers from the wildfire — some the size of baseballs — which posed the greatest danger to the structure, Dongworth said.
In all, 135 wildland firefighters are working inside Waterton park, assisted by nine Alberta air tankers and 14 helicopters.
An additional 125 firefighters and 23 helicopters are standing by to lend a hand if needed.
Officials had stated from the outset that weather will be the biggest factor in how far and how long the fire will burn.
“Conditions today have been decent,” Neumann said.
An incoming cold front is expected to bring both cooler temperatures and precipitation for the balance of the week, which crews hope will swing the balance back to their favour.
“Any time we can get our relative humidity up and our temperatures down,” he said. “I mean, fire still burns — it just tends to slow down.” bpassifiume@postmedia.com twitter.com/bryanpassifiume