FIGHTING B.C.'S WILDFIRES
Military to aid in efforts
The night Lytton, B.C., burned down, Steve Robinson got his team together. The punishing heat wave across British Columbia last week meant fire was a serious risk, and Robinson, the fire chief of Kamloops, B.C., wanted to be prepared if wildfires hit the city.
The next day, it happened. Lightning struck a hillside twice, just after 8 p.m. on Canada Day, setting fire to a steep stretch of trees, sage brush and grass land. Soon the two small fires were one big fire, a “wall of flame between two subdivisions,” as Robinson described it.
In 30 years as a firefighter, he'd never seen a wildfire start in the middle of a city. But now one was burning inside the Kamloops city limits, with roughly 400 homes on the edge of the fire.
“This one started right in the middle,” he said. “We were very close.”
Nightfall meant planes and helicopters couldn't help until morning, so the city fire department had to play defence on the ground through the night.
RCMP helped evacuate nearby homes, while firefighters from Kamloops and the B.C. Wildfire Service set up a perimeter across about a kilometre of fire.
The blaze in one area had come within 15 metres of houses.
“Let's just say I was very concerned,” he said. “We knew what had happened in Lytton.”
The Kamloops fire was part of what the federal government on Sunday called an “unprecedented wildfire situation” in British Columbia, with 184 active wildfires across the province — up by 41 in the past two days — and 84,634 hectares burnt as of Sunday afternoon.
Over the weekend, the B.C. Coroners Service confirmed that a team venturing into Lytton for the first time since the village was ravaged by a wildfire last week, found two people dead. The coroners service said it has not received any other reports of deaths linked to the fire, but officials have said that some people remain unaccounted for, in large part due to the hasty evacuation of the village on Wednesday night.
That evacuation was the subject of criticism earlier Saturday, as the head of the Nlaka'pamux Nation Tribal Council — of which the Lytton First Nation is a member — said the government ignored the needs of community members in the early hours of the emergency.
The federal government on Sunday announced it will accept the province's request to provide Canadian military aircraft to transport personnel and supplies into hard-hit areas and help in the event of an evacuation situation. The fire in Lytton was showing minimal growth on Sunday afternoon, with the B.C. Wildfire Service reporting that it had stayed roughly 80 square kilometres in size since Friday.
For Steve Robinson, in Kamloops, the hours after Canada Day start to blur. To stop the fire, the city needed “the right people in the right place, and lots of water,” he said. “We somehow managed to do that.”
Robinson, who was promoted to fire chief in February, spent the night in a boardroom at the operation centre, coordinating with his commanders on the ground, tracking down water supplies and lining up more staff and equipment. Around dawn, he went over to the fire line where crews had been pumping water at flames that, at times, reached about 30 feet.
Robinson was standing near the fire line around 6:30 a.m. when things started to change. He felt the air thumping. Helicopters, sent by the B.C. Wildfire Service, unloaded big buckets of water onto the hottest areas of the fire.
“When you see the helicopters coming,” he recalled on Sunday, with the fire now almost totally extinguished. Then he stopped speaking, mid-sentence, for a long time.
“That's a good feeling,” he said. “Not so helpless.”
Robinson was, as he put it, “responsible for fire protection” in the city of Kamloops, and hours earlier the city of Kamloops had come within roughly 15 metres of catching fire.
But with the helicopters above them on Friday morning, and the perimeter under control, he could start to see the end of it.