When you think of forest firefighters at work, you probably think of burly guys battling the flames. By Mifi Purvis
Meet some of the North’s dedicated fire management team. They’ve just faced their busiest season, coordinating efforts to save lives and property. Some of them are the burly guys facing hectares of smoke-enshrouded bush, others are the ones at the nerve centre of the firefighting operations. For these folks, fire really is their element.
Mike Sparks has an index finger on a red pin sticking out of a floor-to-ceiling map of the Yukon, the focal point of a large room. The pins are scattered across the map like freckles on a pretty girl. The overhead lights are low and track lighting bathes the map in a stagy glow.
This is the Yukon Wildland Fire Management office in Whitehorse. It’s oddly calm here considering it is operations central in the coordinated effort to count, monitor, and manage the territory’s fires. The coloured pins at Sparks’ fingertips map out those fires in code: a red pin means the fire is active, black means extinguished, and pink, out of control.
With a sweep of his arm, Sparks traces a line across the map where the pins are denser. “It’s a lightning belt that goes across the territory,” says the supervisor of wildfire operations. “And it pretty much sparked up everything.”
Indeed, the summer of 2004 was the Yukon’s busiest forest fire season recorded to date. More than 275 fires burned a record total of two million hectares, an area about the size of Wales. Next door in tinder-dry NWT, fire management teams stood at the ready, waiting for the multiple fire starts to roll in. They had fires but nothing out of the ordinary. In the Yukon, fire officials are still catching their breath.
Fire is part of the boreal forest ecology, so the Northern communities that have been carved out of it risk being engulfed by flame any given summer. That’s why the Yukon and the NWT – Nunavut has no forests to speak of – together staff a complement of at least 400 people each summer to watch the forest. Their mandate is to battle blazes only when there is a potential threat to lives and property.
Sure, the people who fight the fires are the men and women who slog into the blazing forest to meet the flames head-on. But they’re also the people in the air tankers who drop chemical fire retardant on the blazes, the people who watch for smoke and monitor existing fires, and the folks in the operations control centres who see the big picture. Working together, they made sure that residents and their property emerged relatively unscathed in a fire season the magnitude of which the Yukon team, for one, had never experienced before.
In the Whitehorse fire management office, Sparks is working the duty desk, minding the fires across an area as large France. He’s a big guy with a closely trimmed, salty beard. Despite the hectic season, now drawing to a close, he seems calm and unflappable, like most of his colleagues.
In his 25 years in the business, Sparks has heard all the jokes about his name. He got started in a fire tower in Alberta and worked his way through the ranks as a firefighter, then into management. He is drawn to fire, as are most of the 100 or so people who work for the Yukon territorial fire management team in peak season. There’s something exciting about fire at a very basic level. But working with it requires sacrifice.
“I spend a lot of time in the summer away from (my family) because of the job,” says Sparks, who has a wife and a couple of young kids. “But this is what I love to do. And a good fire season is exactly what we’ve gone through.”
He begins to say something else, but he’s interrupted by the fire bell – someone is calling the toll-free fire line to report smoke.
THE SUBARCTIC LANDSCAPE’S primary characteristic is not trees but fire. The boreal forest that covers much of the North is one of the most flammable regions in the world. Mature black spruce stands are ready to explode in dry weather with high temperatures. “It’s designed to burn,” says Al Beaver. “We have so much wild land in the Yukon it’s easier just to let fire go, but the term ‘let it burn’ gives a false sense of our ability to fight fires – it’s going to burn whether we let it or not.”
Like Sparks, Beaver is a multi-year veteran of the Yukon team. His background is in sciences and his job as planning and science supervisor is to examine fuel, topography and weather to see how they interact to influence fire. In a normal season, he notes, one or two districts will bear the brunt of the fires. That’s what happened this year in the NWT, with the South Slave and Deh Cho areas seeing the most action. In the Yukon a high-pressure system, fat and unyielding, squatted over the territory for much of the summer. Record high temperatures ensued, with no real precipitation.
The long Northern summer days add to the mix. Fires burn their hottest after the sun has been on them all day. In southern Canada, the evening dewfall and condensation can serve to tamp a fire down and slow its progress. Midsummer nights in the North, are short, at times non-existent above the Arctic Circle.
“Fires up around Old Crow when the sun’s shining – they can rock all night,” Sparks says. This summer, the fires around Dawson City were charging along like locomotives at 2 a.m.
Over to the east, fire management team members in the NWT were on high alert all season. The only thing that stood between the territory having the average fire season it experienced and a severe season like the Yukon’s, was a lucky dearth of lightning.
At the North Slave office, forest officer Roger Fraser, says they were on their toes all season nonetheless. He recalls years when the lightning did come. Ten years ago, the Sahtu area in the central part of the NWT was hit hard. The entire community of Tulita, on the bank of the Mackenzie River, was evacuated and parts of Norman Wells downriver were cleared of people, too.
In 1998, much of the Ingraham Trail was closed because of fire. The trail is a 70-kilometre stretch of highway leading out of the territorial capital along which many Yellowknifers live or have cabins. It ends at Tibbitt Lake. “Nine fires joined at Tibbitt Lake,” Fraser remembers. As the wall of fire advanced, his team started a line of controlled fires designed to remove some of the fuel and oxygen in the blaze’s path, in a method known as back burning. The team took the punch out of the big fire and ash rained down on nearby Yellowknife.
ith a lifetime in the North and 13 seasons working forest fires the NWT, Fraser has seen the pattern before. Six years ago there was little rain and the spring had been warm. The snow had melted too rapidly, running off into lakes and streams and evaporating before the ground had thawed enough to soak up the moisture. Fraser is hoping for a nice, slow melt next spring to help counter the effects of a drought in 2004.
Like the others, his love for the job is clear. He thrives on the rush and yet he’s calm enough to be called laid back. He says their top priority is safety, making sure the ground crews can escape if there’s a quick and dangerous change in conditions. “The first thing we do on site is to clear a helipad so a helicopter can land easily and get the guys out,” says Fraser, remembering one fire when a helicopter had to pluck the firefighters out of danger.
Helicopters aren’t just used in the heat of firefighting. Mike Templeton, zone protection manager for the Yukon’s Kluane district, is aboard one to check on a fire near the Primrose River, far from human habitation or infrastructure. He’s following up on a report that the blaze had recently jumped the river.
The helicopter flies past Kusawa Lake, glittering in the sunshine below. There are a couple of recreational properties here, spots for Whitehorse residents to escape to. Over the headphones, Templeton and the pilot keep up an easy banter. “Oh, that’s a pretty good fuel load,” Templeton says. He’s talking about the row on row of tall, old spruce trees leading pretty much right up to the back door of a nice lakeshore cabin.
Flying over the pristine Yukon wilderness with sun beating down and a touch of fall colours dusting the smoky landscape, it’s easy to forget that this is part of fire management, too. There’s no drama here, and it seems downright like a day of sightseeing. “I can’t believe they’re paying me for this,” Templeton says over the headphones. Yet it’s this kind of vigilance that made the season in the Yukon disaster-free.
Below, a few trees are burning base to crown in open orange flame, but this fire is not a conflagration of the rank that threatened Dawson City earlier this summer. The helicopter buzzes around the perimeter of the fire, which burns in patches. In places it’s creeping along the ground cover with no visible flame, blackening it in a pattern that makes it look like tar oozing down the side of the hill.
FARTHER WEST, near Haines Junction, the Aishihik fire is at the stage of final mop-up. The ground is slick with wet ash under Shane Oakley’s boots as he negotiates the tree-strewn terrain.
“Your whole job is to make sure everyone has the right equipment,” he says. “You probably put on 20 kilometres a day. We’ve got a good crew, they know what to do, all you have to do is give them the resources.” Oakley is the crew leader and incident commander for the Haines Junction team, one of three at work on this fire.
Five days ago, Oakley, his counterparts Craig Worsfold and Mundy Joe, and their crews were called out to fight a 15-square-hectare blaze that in moister seasons they may not have responded to. Because the fire was just five kilometres from the Aishihik power dam, which supplies the community of Haines Junction, the teams decided to fight it. The attack began by air, with bulky air tankers dumping thick red retardant in surprisingly neat lines around each section of the blaze, limiting it so the ground crews could move in.
A few days later, all that’s left is to lug out the hundreds of kilograms of equipment — on foot and over slimy, lumpy ground up the side of a mountain. This is the drudgework that the ground crews have to trade for the thrill of being the first on the scene, a handful of guys staring down a landscape that’s made to burn.
“I think it’s the adrenaline,” Oakley says, reflecting on his 18 seasons on the job. “Once you get away from it you don’t know how you’re going to cope with a real job. Driving a truck or something doesn’t quite have the same rush.”
His fellow crew leader Craig Worsfold agrees. “It’s a rush and there’s a lot of thinking,” he says. “Things can change daily, hourly. Even at this stage of the fire – the ground is slippery and you’re tired – it’s really important to keep your heads up for falling trees.”
Despite his experience, Worsfold knows that each fire has its surprises. This one, for example, heated up the permafrost enough to cause mudslides – a first in their experience. Some equipment was lost but no one was hurt.
The men credit their crews and their experience for this success, but they have that same relaxed way about them that characterizes fire management personnel at every level. Nobody has seen real panic on the job. “It’s just fire, a bunch of trees, nothing to risk your life over. But my panic level is probably a little higher than most,” says Oakley, adding he’ll be at this job as long as he’s able. If he’s made like Mundy Joe, who passed the strenuous physical in his 60s, he’ll be at for a while yet.
John Trotter is at the Aishihik mop-up too. His job as zone protection manager for the Kluane district is to ensure they the crews have the equipment and manpower to do the job. Though he’s mainly in the office now he used to work the front lines and feels it’s important to “get dirty once in a while.” He reaches an arm deep into the muck near a charred tree and pulls out a handful of boggy soil and peat, wringing it out like a sponge. “You have to slog through this dirt and mud to really appreciate what firefighters deal with.”
BACK IN THE WILDLAND Fire Management office in Whitehorse, senior duty clerk Catherine Spence finishes talking to a caller who’s reported smoke. Hers is the kind of unflappable voice you would want to reach when reporting a fire, articulate and thoughtful. She anchors the Yukon office as the staff rotates in and out, and has proved a constant presence for the past 18 fire seasons. During that time she has seen the changes to management, from telexes to faxes to e-mail, and as of this year MODIS, a system of satellite mapping that shows the growth of North American forest fires in real time on a computer screen. She takes it in stride.
“It can be challenging,” Spence says. A MODIS map of the Yukon is up on her computer screen as she checks on how some of the active fires have been behaving over the last 24 hours. “And there have been moments of intense anxiety,” she admits, recalling how they couldn’t raise a plane on the radio once. (The plane and its crew turned out to be fine.) But like the others, Spence’s panic bar is set high. She works seasonally, leaving the territory after each summer for New Mexico. She’ll be back next year; she thrives on the challenge, variety and pace of the work.
Dawn Bouquot is one of the people who speaks with Spence on a regular basis, calling in weather reports over the radio. Bouquot works the fire tower on Haeckle Mountain overlooking Whitehorse, one of several towers strategically situated across the Yukon and NWT. Bouquot has wanted this job since she was 20, attracted to the surroundings and the quiet. Now that her children are grown she’s realized the dream. From her vantage point, she can keep watch for smoke almost to Carcross Road, where she lives. In her first season, she’s proving to be a natural. During the times this summer when the fire threat was highest, she could only leave her perch during her shift to use the bathroom. Now at the end of the season, she’s freer to move about between the tower, where a work of needlepoint sits half-completed, and the spare living quarters downstairs.
The tower is surrounded by scrubby trees and meadow. Bouquot has an expansive view, one she shares with hikers and paragliders who dare to make the bone-jarring drive up. From here you can see a swath of charred forest down a nearby slope. It burned in 1998 and took 80 tanker loads of fuel to stop it from advancing on a couple of the territorial capital’s many wooded subdivisions. Whitehorse and its sprawling residential areas are surrounded on all sides by the heaviest fuel load in the Yukon. If there is an absence of panic, there’s a level of concern.
Maybe Whitehorse takes its cue from residents in Dawson City, who voiced concern that media attention to fires in the area this summer was just scaring tourists away. Dawson was smoked in for good parts of the summer and fires roared to within 25 kilometres. Despite the unprecedented threat, residents were more irritated by smoke than frightened by fire.
And as always, fire teams across the North will be playing a complicated game of chess, calmly strategizing and assessing fire indices for the season, day and even hour. Other teams will stand at the ready to fight fires at home or in other jurisdictions, if they’re called upon. The fire management personnel profiled here have counterparts in every district across the Yukon and NWT. Each of them has a story to tell and everyone is as hard working.
Some laymen say that this fire season was the worst ever in the Yukon. The party line coming from fire management dubs it the “most severe.” But the teams were doing the job they love and there was no major injury or property loss. Around the office in Whitehorse, they’re calling it the best season ever.
