Small northern communities face unique struggles in fighting wildfires

When the Parker Lake wildfire bore down on Fort Nelson, B.C. last year in May, firefighter Sonja Leverkus said finding water to fight the blaze became a significant challenge. 

“The ground was still frozen at the time,” she said. “I seriously recall being on my hands and knees on the fire line, digging into the frozen dirt, still trying to make a sludge to put on some of the hot spots.”

It was just one example of the many challenges remote northern areas can face in fighting fires. As wildfires continue to rage in parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, many of these regions are struggling with issues like access to water, dry conditions, expensive equipment and limited fire-response personnel.

 Drought, for example, can be a major issue in some of these areas, Leverkus said. 

“Places that we used to be able to dig a little hole and pull water out of to help us do mop up activities are not existent,” she said. “We’re really seeing a lack of water.”

Remote communities suffer in part because when fires break out in more densely populated regions, provincial resources get reallocated to those areas, Leverkus said.

“And so sometimes it does feel like… we are on our own here in the northeast.”

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Transporting firefighting equipment and resources can also pose a challenge. Moving equipment from southern B.C. to Fort Nelson can be “incredibly expensive,” she said, and can take several days.

One of the biggest challenges is keeping around a fire crew ready at all times.

“A person has to be very creative to keep crew around to stay to be here to also help fight fire.”

Ken Lodge, mayor of Lac du Bonnet, Man., where wildfires recently forced around 1,000 people to evacuate, said he understands the challenges of having enough firefighters available.

“We in the smaller and more remote areas don’t have the revenue to staff a large, permanent — or even a small, permanent — fire department,” Lodge said. “So we subsist on volunteer people.”

Training is “extraordinarily expensive,” he said, and not everyone can do every job. 

And because they’re volunteers, they can’t always leave their paid jobs to go and fight fires, he said.

“It does mean that you’re very rarely going to have necessarily a full crew out fighting fires,” he said. “Especially if you have a fire that’s as significant as what we’ve had here, where it’s multiple days long and there’s a lot of territory that needs to be covered out here, with in some cases, limited access.” 

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Equipment, as well, is limited and comes with a huge cost that is borne by the municipalities, Lodge said. 

Still, while rural fire departments like his are relatively well trained and equipped, when it comes to wildfires, “the resources still overall aren’t there to combat something of this magnitude.”

Despite the resource challenges, Leverkus and other fire experts do believe there are ways to make their jobs less challenging — mitigation strategies that may help lessen the damage and destruction caused by the blazes.

“I don’t think that we should ever think something’s going to stop a fire from impinging a community,” she said. “I think that we should be thinking about ways to slow it down.”

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And for that, prevention is key. Cliff Buettner, former director of forestry and emergency and protective services with Prince Albert Grand Council in Saskatchewan, said it’s crucial for homeowners to eliminate the potential fire fuel sources from their surroundings, or break up what’s called a fire triangle — heat, air and fuel.

“Get rid of the fuel around your house,” he said. “Get rid of the things that can burn; move them away.”

Cedar trees, for example, are a particular hazard, Buettner said.

“Everyone’s got a nice ornamental cedar up against their house. If there’s no moisture, where are the sparks going to start? In that cedar.”

“The wood you pile up against your house, it’s called a home ignition zone around your home. Clean that up as much as you can to eliminate anything that can start on fire, anything that a spark will land on that will start it on fire.”

Magda Zachara, program director of FireSmart Canada, said that in the majority of cases, homes burn down from wildfires because of embers landing on their property from a fire that can be several kilometres away. 

“That is what causes the destruction,” she said. “It’s not the wall of flame. It’s the embers that are transported through the air.”

That’s why FireSmart Canada, a national program that helps make neighbourhoods in Canada more resilient against wildfires, says it’s so important for people to mitigate or protect the “immediate zone” of a building or home. That’s typically the 1.5 metres around the structure, as well as the structure itself.

Removing combustible materials from that area increases the chances of one’s home surviving by up to 90 per cent, she said. 

“If you’re not going to focus on anything else, focus on this area and make it as non-combustible as possible. Remove anything that can easily ignite.”