On Wednesday, October 25, about 50 community members met with members of Council and BC Wildfire Service to talk about the response to the West Kiskatinaw Wildfire: what worked, what didn’t, what could have been better.
In addition to most of council, Darren Van Horn was there to represent BC Wildfire, who was part of the initial response to the fire. Chief Dustin Curry was there to represent the Tumbler Ridge Fire Department and Sergeant Jaime Moffat was there on behalf of the RCMP.
After a brief introduction by Mayor Krakowka, Van Horn told the story of the fire from the perspective of BC Wildfire Service. Van Horn is a firefighter as well as incident commander for the Dawson Creek region. He says the West Kiskatinaw fire was first detected on June 6 in the late morning.
“We immediately dispatched an initial attack crew as well as air tankers,” says Van Horn. The crew and air tankers arrived at the scene about 45 minutes of it being reported, and the fire had already grown to 1500 ha. “That’s some pretty extreme fire behaviour,” he says, “and it doesn’t really give us much of a chance to be able to do much.”
He points to a series of maps on the wall. “The one on the left is just a rough estimate of how big the fire got the first day. We weren’t able to get very close to it. Our aircraft could only fly to within about 500 metres of the fire, just because it was so hot. There were flames 200, 300 even 400 feet high. It ran just about 20 kilometres, covering about 4000 ha that first day. So that’s pretty extreme for what we typically see. If we go back to 2006, when Tumbler Ridge was evacuated with the fire to the north of us, that fire was around 10,000 hectares and it took three weeks to get that big. We saw almost half of that size in the first day.”
The fire was moving in a north/northeast direction, meaning that the One Island Lake area had to be evacuated that night. “With the movement we were seeing of that fire, and with it aimed directly at them, we evacuated that area.”
The fire stalled on day two, not moving much closer to One Island Lake. “The second day we didn’t have the same winds. They were much lighter. So the fire didn’t really move to the northeast, though it did widen out.” He says by the end of day two, the fire had grown to 10,000 ha.
“At that point we were trying to come up with a game plan on how to deal with it. An incident management team was ordered the first afternoon, as we knew that this was beyond what our local fire zone could deal with.”
That’s an understatement. Most of the local efforts were directed at the North Peace, where a number of fires—including the largest fire in BC history, the Donnie Creek Fire.
Indeed, in June, wildfire crews were just coming on line. “We were in the middle of our training season for our crews,” says Van Horn. “A lot of them had just started within the previous couple weeks. So we were having a tough time getting personnel up to the north. Just because typically that’s not when we get these type of fires.”
The plan, he says, was to flank the fire with heavy equipment building guards at both the north and south, though this was hampered by the fact that the fire was still burning aggressively on all sides. “At that time, there was no thought or concern that Tumbler Ridge was under any risk. Typically, our winds do come from the west, and blow to the east. And that’s what we saw that first two days. But this year was anything but normal, and on the morning of the eighth, we got out to the fire to find that it had grown about six kilometers towards the west, which was a huge surprise to us. It was unexpected that the winds that we had overnight pushed the fire that far.”
By nine in the morning, he says, the fire was already exhibiting rank 5 behaviour. “Really, there’s no way to stop that.”
And so, later that morning, with the fire still moving towards Tumbler Ridge, he says, BC Wildfire made the decision to call for an evacuation of Tumbler Ridge.
He says that day, the fire reached Highway 52 near Quality Creek just as the wind started to die and evening fell. “We got lucky,” he says. “If it had crossed Quality Creek with a head of steam, it probably would have kept going. But that was the wettest part of the country right there. And it got there just as nightfall came. So the fire intensity dropped as the humidity went up and the temperature went down. So the fire sat down in the Quality Creek area. That was the best thing that could have happened for us. That gave us an opportunity.”
He says if the fire had reached that area earlier in the day with the wind behind it and a few more hours to keep burning it might have reached the town. “It would have had a head of steam to go through that wetter area and then back into the dry fuels, which are up onto the mountainside.”
But that, ultimately, was the end of the fire’s advance on Tumbler Ridge. “We took full advantage of that, and got heavy equipment in there, and were able to get a fire guard around it in the next couple days.”
In the end, the fire burned 26,000 ha. “We had an incident management team on this fire for a month, which is a fairly long time. And in that month, there was, between this fire and the Peavine Creek fire, over 200 personnel. We finally got that bit of precipitation, and things calmed down, and we were able to release the large incident management team to go help out in other parts of the province, and the zone was able to take the fire back.”
So Van Horn and his team went back to working on the fire. “We never left it at any time, probably until just about September. We had people out there working on areas that were closer to the edges, and we did do aircraft patrol fairly regularly on it. And when we would get public reports, we would go check those out as well. But it was those three days where most of the damage was done, and then it was the rest of the summer was clean up.”
There’s lots more coverage of the fire coming up in the next issues of the paper, including why there was no alert and a response from those who stayed behind.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.