Tackle a wall of flames moving faster than a truck? That’s what these volunteers do
The heat across southern Alberta is drying out crops and setting the stage for a new grassfire season. That means hundreds of volunteers in fire crews are now keeping their pagers close and getting ready for a call.
They move quickly when a fire starts because high winds in the region can drive the flames across the prairies at up to 100 kilometres an hour, said Nathan Coté, fire chief for the Municipal District of Taber.
“It can move faster than our trucks can move,” he said. “We call them short-fuelled fires and they have a certain intensity that people don’t understand. They think they’re small (but) the flame height can be anywhere from two to 20 feet high,” he said.
“When you get some of the taller grass with high winds, we never want to get out in front of that fire because it can move very quickly.… It’s just as dangerous as those forest fires.”
Coté’s teams train weekly on their techniques, like racing along the side of the fire and working toward the head of it like a pair of pinchers. He has more than 80 volunteers organized out of six stations in the municipal district, which is about 200 kilometres southeast of Calgary.
The crews that respond for the Taber station were out on a recent Tuesday evening. On this night, they were working outside the local water treatment plant, practising how to set up sprinklers to create a dome of mist all around a building to protect it if a fire was approaching. The sprinklers need to overlap, and to make every drop count because, unlike in a city, there’s no fire hydrant for the crews to hook up to.
Cornelius Neudorf was overseeing the exercise. He’s the district chief for the Taber Regional Fire Services for Stations 4 and 7. He said their water trucks can haul only 900 to 1,200 gallons (4,100 to 5,500 litres), so as soon as they suspect a building is at risk, they call in extra help.
With grassfires, local farmers are also quick to add resources: water, equipment and know-how.
“When you see that plume of smoke in the sky, there’s farmers that come together from surrounding areas with their tractors and disc rippers and they’ll start cutting lines with the tractors a mile or two ahead, just to make sure that we catch it in time,” said Neudorf. “It’s really amazing to see the community come together when a situation like that happens.”
The bare dirt left behind the plow robs the fire of fuel. At the evening session, volunteers practised that technique themselves by using pick axes and other hand tools to dig into the dirt. They talked through how to adjust the width of the space they dug depending on the height of the flames.
With smaller flames and little wind, they used leaf blowers and brooms to simulate sweeping the fire back on itself, controlling it that way. They laughed and joked as they worked, but also seemed to take the work seriously.
While most of Alberta’s fire season has been about forest fires, some crews are preparing to fight grass fires. The resources and tactics these teams use might not look familiar, as firefighters in rural areas — most of them volunteers — face different challenges than their city counterparts.
There’s another difference between these men and women and fire crews in an urban setting. These volunteers are here because they want to protect friends, neighbours and family members, and when they respond to a call, there’s a good chance that’s exactly who is under threat. In a small community, people know each other.
Jake Penner was practising with the rest of the crew. He said he woke up one morning at 2 a.m. for a call. High CO2 levels were detected in a residential home and it turned out to be his cousin’s place.
“His whole family got out safely and everything. That was definitely nice to be there for him and make sure that they were all safe,” he said.
“The biggest challenge would be going to the calls where the worst actually does happen,” Penner added. “You have a fatality. You just got to be there emotionally for them and support them. It’s kind of hard to get through those times. But yeah, you just got to be there for them.”
Around Taber, the crews respond to about 250 calls during a typical year, including about 80 grassfires. They have mutual aid agreements with the surrounding areas to get more help for the major calls.
That’s where you really feel like part of something significant, said Kris Schortinghuis, a lieutenant at the station.
“To work shoulder-to-shoulder with people from other communities as well. Feels like it’s really neighbours helping neighbours, like the entire way like up the chain.”
Because of the moisture during the early part of the summer, the area around Taber has been green and hasn’t had any major fires yet, said Coté. But “over the last few weeks with the extreme heat, things are beginning to cure and dry up very quickly.”
Further east, in Cypress County, fire chief Jason Linton said the land there is also starting to dry out, and they’re also expecting to get busier.
His team recently plotted every fire call on a map to get a better handle on what’s been causing them. He said the vast majority are concentrated along the highway corridors: the Trans-Canada and Highway 41.
“The leading cause is improperly discarded cigarette butts, and equipment that fails like campers and trucks that have chains that are too long that drag against the road and create sparks. Or failing equipment like hot brake drums,” he said.
“Our second biggest cause is our agricultural community when they’re swathing, mowing and doing farm operations — just a combine hitting a rock. We do have fires caused that way, as well. But our agricultural community, they do a good job having (a person on) fire watch and having water on site during extreme conditions.”
