Fire in the Forest

by CHUCK TOBIN

MINTO – When firefighters on Carmacks 14 speak about the wall, they aren't referring to Pink Floyd's 1970s platinum album. Nor are they speaking of the point at which the body has exhausted its energy reserves as is often experienced by marathon runners.

What they're speaking of is one of Mother's Nature's most extreme hazards: a wall of flame, much taller than the trees, ferociously pulling itself forward through boreal forest dominated by volatile black spruce.

As it approaches, the inferno's want of essential oxygen sucks the available air from all directions.

When you're close enough, when you know it's time to ignite the backfire in hopes of collapsing the wall, you feel the air rushing past you.

"It gets windy," says Scott Hamilton, fire boss for Carmacks fire number 14. "It sounds as though there's a jet over top of you."

Hamilton, as he puts it, has "met the wall," and so have a number of others working the blaze that has consumed 60,000 hectares in the last five weeks.

You can either be invigorated and awed by the experience, or you can react the opposite way, he says. For him, it was invigoration – invigoration that still lives in his voice and his eyes when he talks about it.

"One guy did meet the wall, and he was shocked for about three or four days, and finally asked to be relieved," the fire boss pointed out in an interview Wednesday at the base camp located next door to Minto Resorts.

He does not speak lightheartedly of the incident. It is, he adds, under a safety review.

Hamilton, however, insists firefighters on 14 are not performing their duties recklessly, but rather fulfilling their role in a dangerous job.

From the time he was summoned to the fire at 1:00 a.m. June 14 as a member of the regional fire team for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and for the next couple of weeks Hamilton and staff have encountered the fiery wrath a number of times.

He recalls one, vividly. As the fire marched northward down the Yukon River valley, along the Klondike Highway toward Minto, he and the crew were tasked with saving a riverbank home.

On a ridge now far away, he waited and watched the approaching flame front so that he could instruct the waiting crew members when to light the backfire. It's crucial, he says, to ignite at the right time. The main wall of fire must pull the backfire into itself with such might over the fight for the air that lies between the two that it collapses because the backfire has already consumed the fuel immediately in front.

"When the wall is coming, I tell myself I do not want to die, and others I have talked to felt the same. So you want to do it (backfire) at the right time because otherwise it's just going to walk right over your fire, right to you."

The backfire worked. Not more than 50 metres from the new home after taking a run of well over a kilometre, the wall was brought to the ground.

In the same instant, though, its ferocity picked it back up and pushed it in a new direction, right toward Hamilton. As fast as he could drive out in his truck, the wall followed. The ignition crew followed its exit route to the river and was ferried by helicopter to the safety of a river island.

In the extreme fire conditions that existed and to some degree still exist on fire 14, and fire 18, burning on the other side of the Yukon River, there is not a lot that can be done when the fire explodes out of control, he says. Using air attack, he adds, is pretty much ineffective on flames that can boil skyward many times higher than the three tops.

Fighting fire with fire is what has to be done.

Hamilton recalls he and another firefighter saving a cabin, also in the Minto area.

On that day, two scientific indicators used to measure how tinder and volatile the forest fuels are were almost off the scale.

The fire weather index hits extreme at 30. That day, it was hovering in the mid-eighties. The build-up index hits extreme at 60. It was over 200.

With only two pocket lighters on hand – as all other suppression equipment was strapped in use – Hamilton and Paul Butra, the Carmacks duty officer, ignited a backfire.

"It was just light I flicked the lighter against gas spilled on the driveway and then it shot up, whoooooosshhh, 20 metres up into the trees, in no time at all."

In his 14 years on the fireline, the 33-year-old Whitehorse resident has never experienced the intensity displayed by 14.

Even the more experienced Alaskan crew members with 20 years or so on the job say they haven't either, Hamilton says.

And he's not about to forget the evening of June 24.

Shortly before 6 p.m., Hamilton was assessing a protection strategy for a cabin on Jackfish Lake, still well over three kilometres from the head of the fire. The plan was to establish a sprinkler zone around it the next day.

Then came the fire storm.

At 7:30 p.m., fire 18 started kicking up a column, the first indicator a storm was brewing, he says.

About an hour later, an overhead aircraft used to direct air attack bombers was flying overhead at about 3,000 metres. It suggested to camp 14 that things were brewing, and that an evacuation might be wise.

"By 9:23, it was total darkness here," says Hamilton. "You could not see a guy standing next to you three feet away unless you had headlights of a vehicle on … These are times and dates I have been remembering ever since they happened. I do not even have look in my diary."

"We came back to the command tent and that is when Rob (Legair, a member of the regional firefighting team) suggested to me that maybe we have a meeting one what we were going to do in case things got worse.

"We had a meeting (of personnel in camp)on how we were going to protect against loss and injury of people and how we could protect the site."

It was determined that the available vehicles on site would not be sufficient to move all the personnel. A school bus from Whitehorse was ordered and teams were organized to respond in certain areas should hot sparks begin dropping.

"There were a lot of people with very concerned-looking faces," Hamilton notes.

After an hour and a half of darkness, the blackness turned to dark brown and eventually to grey as the light of the long summer night worked its way through the smoke.

The next day's assessment showed immense growth during the storm of both fires 14 and 18.

Fire 14, he says, grew by15,000 hectares in three or four hours that night, meaning it travelled between three and four kilometres in the period. The Jackfish Lake cabin, having been slightly over three kilometres from the fire head just hour earlier, was destroyed.

Hamilton also points out that while fire 14, on the east side of the river, travelled in a northward direction during the storm, fire 18 moved southward on the west side of the river suggesting a tornado-like wind that pushed one in one and the other in the other direction as it spun over the vast area.

No. It's not the four or five tonnes of grub, and other supplies, that 100 firefighting and support staff go through every four days that Hamilton dwells on during the interview at the Minto base camp.

It's not the eight or nine kilometres of hose-line being worked by firefighters nor is it the snaking trail of Cat lines being established along the fire's perimeter under his direction.

It's not the 432 liters of fuel that a Bell 212 helicopter will burn in an hour's work.

And it's not the $1.6 million it has cost to fight 14 so far.

It's the wall, the immensity and the intensity of fire 14, which is very much still classed as out of control.

As the base camp clock strikes mid-afternoon Wednesday, maybe some 15 kilometres to the south, fire 18 stars kicking up another column or two. By late afternoon, referred to as the "witching hour" by firefighters there, the wall is up and moving again.