BATTLING THE BLAZING DEMON
As Dez Shubert drove south toward the fire threatening to engulf Fort McMurray, it felt like a charge into the apocalypse. All four lanes of Highway 63 were clogged with vehicles heading north, and he had to go off road, through fences, across backyards — “whatever it took” to reach the flames that everyone else was fleeing.
A training co-ordinator for the fire department at an oilsands plant 30 kilometres north of the city, Shubert and his fellow Suncor Energy firefighters were among the first wave of responders as the wildfire swept into the city on the afternoon of May 3.
After reaching Fort McMurray, he and his crew were directed to the Wood Buffalo subdivision, nestled amid forest on the city’s western edge. Choking smoke blocked out the sun, but towering flames illuminated the scene. “When we got there, there were seven city blocks on fire,” Shubert said in an interview this week. “It far exceeded anything we had ever imagined.”
Firefighters would try to identify a point where the fire’s advance could be stopped and soak it with water, only to see the fire push them back. “Honestly, I just thought, ‘We’re f---ed,’ ” Shubert said. “There were more than a dozen times when I stepped back from my guys, did a 360 turnaround and realized there’s flames in every direction. Everything in my sight was on fire. And I just thought, ‘My God, we’re not going to stop this.’ ”
It was a little more than 48 hours earlier, on a hot Sunday afternoon, that a helicopter patrol with the provincial wildfire agency spotted a small fire about nine kilometres southwest of the city.
It is believed to have started on a power line right-of-way near Horse Creek, and by the time the helicopter found it around 4 p.m., the fire covered two hectares — a little smaller than four football fields.
Technically, it was just the beginning of fire season, but with a dry spring and unseasonably hot temperatures for the first week of May, fireprotection officials were on alert.
As it later roared into Fort McMurray and laid waste to some 2,400 buildings, the Horse Creek fire would be described as a monster, a beast, a demon. In the beginning, though, it was not some animate creature but an unexceptional physical phenomenon. On average, Alberta experiences about 1,600 wildfires a year, of which roughly 95 per cent are brought under control within a day. In the summer, lightning causes many of the fires, but this time of year there is almost always some human connection, said Mike Flannigan, professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta.
While the cause of this fire remains under investigation, he said possible sources include sparks from a tree falling on a power line or an all-terrain vehicle tearing through the bush. (On May 6, five days after the fire started, the province declared a provincewide ban on ATV use on public lands.)
“What happens there, and the driver may not be aware of what’s going on, is little bits of organic material — it looks like mud but there’s a fair bit of organic material — stick to the muffler,” Flannigan said. “It heats and starts to smoulder and then you go over a bump and it drops off onto some dry fuel.”
Dry fuel was in abundant supply in the forest outside Fort McMurray — brown grass, sticks and droughtstressed conifers that went up like kindling. “Winter’s just finished and there hasn’t been rain for two months,” said Chad Morrison, senior wildfire manager for the provincial government. “All the trees are very dry.” Aspen and poplar, which normally serve as a brake to forest fires, were still leafless and parched. In fact, Morrison said, the four factors that feed a wildfire — fuel, temperature, wind and humidity — were all at extreme levels.
After the helicopter spotted the fire, it immediately dropped a four-person crew equipped with pumps, hoses, chainsaws and axes to begin the initial attack. The crew hooked up the helicopter’s bucket so it could scoop water from a pond or swamp to dowse the fire, and they sought out a water supply to feed their hoses. Air tankers were called in to drop fire retardant mixed with water; the first was on the scene 45 minutes after the fire was detected, and three more were soon working the fire, Morrison said. Two additional helicopters quickly joined the effort, putting about a dozen firefighters on the ground.
But within two hours, the fire had grown to 60 hectares. The battle was being lost.
“We threw the kitchen sink at it,” Morrison said. “Usually if you can catch them when they’re small enough, you can prevent them from getting larger. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how good your firefighting force is, there are going to be times when Mother Nature just beats you, and this is one of those cases.”
Wildfire ranger Kent Jennings was an hour south of Fort McMurray on May 1, heading home after a weekend off, when he saw the column of smoke in the distance. In his 11th year fighting wildfires, he knew there was trouble. “I started freaking out and thinking, I’ve got to get to the office,” he said in an interview this week.
It was night when he arrived, and he was told to report for duty at 6 a.m. Monday. As a strike team leader, he helicoptered into the fire site after a briefing and had about 50 people working under him. Wildfires relent overnight when temperatures drop and there is more moisture, and the Horse Creek fire’s exponential growth had eased up; it covered 100 hectares that morning, which is “somewhat manageable under certain conditions,” Jennings said. Arriving at the fire, he soon realized the conditions were not co-operating.
The temperature soared above 30 C before noon, and relative humidity, a measure of the moisture in the air, dropped to a very low 15 per cent. Wildfire experts talk of extreme danger at the “crossover point” when the temperature in degrees is greater than the percentage of relative humidity; here the temperature was twice as high. Bulldozers worked through the night clearing trees to create a fireguard — a barren gap that is supposed to starve the fire of fuel. “Nine times out of 10, that would really knock down a fire,” Jennings said. He showed up with his crew one morning to check out the barrier, and embers were flying right across it in the high winds, igniting trees on the other side.
“We were throwing everything we had at it, and it was still not responding,” Jennings said. “The first couple days were brutal.” Another common tactic — lighting a controlled fire ahead of the main fire to rob it of fuel — was not possible because the blaze was too close to town.
While the battle was being waged in the forest to the southwest, residents of Fort McMurray went about their daily lives. Smoke rose on the horizon, ash fell, but this was not the first time wildfire had skirted the city. Evacuation orders were issued for some southern neighbourhoods then lifted when winds shifted. Fort McMurray regional fire chief Darby Allen told a news conference May 2 that although the fire had grown to 1,250 hectares, he was encouraged that it would spare the city. Mayor Melissa Blake was exhausted but had time for a joke on Twitter that night. “So really don’t smoke driving a quad in the backcountry to light a campfire and set off fireworks!” she wrote.
Twenty-four hours later, the municipality had issued a full evacuation order, forcing nearly 90,000 people to abandon their homes, and tears had replaced laughter.
Overnight, the fire doubled in size, leaping from tinder-dry treetop to treetop. The fast-moving crown fire was also shooting off embers that could start new fires kilometres away, crossing the Athabasca and Hangingstone rivers. Wildfire experts assess fires by the amount of power given off per metre of fire line. Above 4,000 kilowatts/metre, it is too dangerous for ground crews, Flannigan said. Above 10,000, air bombardment has little effect.
“I’m guessing this will be probably around 100,000 kilowatts/metre,” he said. “It developed its own thunder storm. This happens during high-intensity fires. It generated lightning that started new fires. It’s the mother of new fires.”
Rory Gibbons, a Suncor firefighter, was off duty and heading to a lake south of Fort McMurray on May 3 when he got the call to report for work. As he approached town, he hit traffic provoked by the evacuation order. Stuck on the highway, he looked up to see about 10 water bombers stacked in formation and a dozen helicopters, making passes to dump water and retardant.
Shortly after 3 p.m., the fire’s first front hit town. It struck a trailer park and then the southern neighbourhoods of Abasand and Beacon Hill. Gibbons was on Highway 63 near the trailer park when the fire “just rolled over us” as embers jumped the highway from west to east. Still, he knew there was nothing to burn on the highway and was more worried about the potential danger of a panicking motorist smashing into him.
The chaotic images that later emerged of an evacuation through a tunnel of flame make it hard to fathom that more of the city was not lost. But luckily for Fort McMurray, the fire was not alone in its ability to create weather.
Mel Angelstad, another Suncor firefighter, said that when the call for mutual aid went out from the city fire department, he was dispatched with four others on a pumper truck to protect the Thickwood neighbourhood, northwest of downtown.
After hooking up the pumper to a hydrant, Angelstad used the turret on the back to rain water down on the tree line and the houses while his crewmates did the same with hoses. City and wildland firefighters were spraying on either side of them. They had about 15 minutes.
“That fire hit us, it was about three blocks wide, and it had 100 feet of flame coming at you. It’s loud and it’s coming fast. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen something like that in my life,” Angelstad said.
He climbed onto a rooftop for a view of the approaching flames. “We’re like, ‘Oh man, it’s going to roll over us real easy,’ because the wind’s coming at us, too,’ ” he said. But about 100 metres away, the farthest point they had been able to soak, “It just kicked it right down. The huge rolling flame just calmed right down. There was huge smoke. We stopped the rollover on the top of the trees.” After about five minutes, a ground fire came at them across the forest floor, but that was easier to contain. “We never lost a house in that area,” he said.
Similarly intense battles were being fought, and would continue to be fought over the next 48 hours, all around Fort McMurray. Sometimes, in order to save, firefighters had to destroy. Darren Fletcher, who works with the Fort McMurray heavy equipment company Concrete Army, joined his boss as fire tore through the Timberlea neighbourhood. In videos Fletcher posted on Facebook — he called them “heartbreaking” — his boss manoeuvres a giant excavator to rip down undamaged houses and create a line to stop the approaching fire.
“The fire marshal told us, ‘You’ve got to knock the house down. If you knock these houses down, it will make a firewall and it will stop the rest of the neighbourhood from burning down,’ ” Fletcher said in an interview.
About five kilometres away, Shubert faced similar decisions — which houses must be left to burn before a stand could be made. The municipal water supply was overtaxed, and hydrants failed. Breathing apparatus was reserved for those in greatest danger, because there were not enough oxygen bottles to last 12 hours of constant firefighting. “I’m pretty sure we all consumed a lot of very unhealthy smoke,” Shubert said.
He never shared his initial pessimism with his men. “I would just say, ‘OK, we’ve got to figure this out. We’ve got to beat it.’ ”
And they did. Premier Rachel Notley said Monday that first responders had saved nearly 90 per cent of the city, calling them “true Alberta heroes.”
The danger to Fort McMurray appears to have passed, but the fire rages on to the east. As of Thursday afternoon, it covered 241,000 hectares and was burning 13 kilometres from the Saskatchewan border. There were 509 wildland firefighters, 31 helicopters and 13 air tankers fighting it.
On Thursday, Jennings’ team was out building “dozer guard” northwest of the city, creating a barrier in case the fire circles back. He feels confident the city is safe, but the “demon,” as he calls it, has shown an ability to surprise.
WE THREW THE KITCHEN SINK AT IT.