The twin brother
It was early evening on May 4, the day after Fort McMurray’s mandatory evacuation, the day after 88,000 people were suddenly forced to pack their bags and leave.
By then, firefighters from within the city, nearby communities and oil worker camps had assembled to team-up against a wildfire that was picking off the edges of the area. It was growing, and fast. Unseasonably rainless weather had left vegetation parched, turning it into a seemingly perfect fuel for encroaching flames.
Firefighters often remark that a larger blaze is capable of creating its own unpredictable and extreme weather conditions. Wildfires, they say, hardly play fair.
An observation that 29-year-old Jamie Germain knows all too well.
The wildfire’s latest round of heavy winds, heat and clouds of smoke were slowly but steadily taking a toll on both the city’s own firefighters and their reinforcements. Among them were Suncor firefighters Germain, his best friend and co-worker Mel Angel- stad, and Angelstad’s girlfriend, Nexen firefighter Rachelle Daniel.
After dousing flare-ups that were threatening a bridge, the three observed four houses engulfed in the city’s subdivision of Parsons Creek. Protected inside the cabin of an E-One Titan fire truck, they drove toward the flames for a closer look.
Germain, a Plamondon, Alta., native who has called Fort McMurray home for the past decade, knew the area well. He was also on edge, knowing his twin brother, Scott Germain, lived nearby.
“I remember I kept on telling myself, no way it’s going to be his house, no way it’s going to be his house,” Jamie said. “It’s that feeling where you don’t want something to be true but you know it is.”
As the rescue vehicle turned the corner onto Blackburn Drive, Jamie met one of his fears head on. One of the fire’s victims, a two-storey house already lit up, belonged to Scott, an acting fire captain with the Fort McMurray fire department, who was working just streets away.
Angelstad hit the house with the truck’s water turret for just 10 seconds but stopped. By then, just a shell of the home remained and with more homes at risk of catching fire, the crew couldn’t afford to waste the water.
“The whole point is to stop the whole fire, not just one fire house by house,” Jamie told the Star.
His fight against the fire now personal, he hosed down flames at other homes. Once the ferocity of the blaze died down and the area was secure, he returned to his brother’s house to fight a losing battle.
“I grabbed the hose and started spraying water,” he said. “There was always the thought that maybe (Scott and his wife, Michelle) could salvage something.”
With the smouldering heat diminished, he removed his jacket and went on his knees while aiming a hose into the charred remains. This “little trick,” he said, takes the weight of the hose off the hands, allowing him to hold his position longer without losing strength. “So I could stay there longer,” he said.
Today, he remembers the event as a “long day that you can’t get rid of” and one of the lowest moments he endured during the city’s natural disaster, in which roughly 2,400 structures burned to the ground.
“There’s always those thoughts, that what if we could have gotten there sooner it might have been different,” he said.
“It made it more heartbreaking because I knew Scott was so close, two blocks over, but he couldn’t come over because he had a job to do.
“The fire in (Scott’s) house was more real to me . . . you try to stay focused but at the same time, ‘Wow, Scott and his wife just lost everything.’ ”
A scalding sense of grief doesn’t make it easy for Jamie to view the photo displaying his efforts.
“How do you look at that?” he said. “But we’ll have that experience together forever, it was terrible but it happened between us.
“You knew everything was changing and were left wondering what was going to happen next.”