Brad Desjarlais didn’t see anything suspicious at first. He was surrounded by green trees and shrubs, 10 metres outside the charred land left by the fire.
“All I smelled was a quick puff of smoke,” Desjarlais said, remembering the moment. His voice quiets to a whisper after he sniffs the air two times.
“It’s here, I know it’s here.”
He was checking the perimeter around the 5,000-hectare fire that crept to within 18 kilometres of Fox Creek and is still out of control.
And in the fresh green of spring, the fire had crept underground, risen through the roots of an old rotting spruce and burned up the middle of the tree trunk, hiding silently in the hollow left by a woodpecker.
The tree top toppled over and flames were starting to creep out like a candle, easily fed by fresh winds.
Desjarlais moved in, one of about 150 fire crew on the ground, working to get the blaze under control.
“This still has a lot of potential,” the 32-year-old said Thursday, sitting on the edge of a blackened forest. “All it takes is one good wind.”
And the wind has been good. Strong. Constant, even through the deep of night. That’s unusual and made this fire – like the one that destroyed homes in Slave Lake – extremely severe and difficult to control the first few days.
It has been dangerous for the fire crews, who initially had to keep their eyes upwards for falling limbs and turned down to catch puffs of bluish-white smoke that indicates the fire is spreading underground.
Equipped with shovels, axes and backpacks of water, Desjarlais and his crew have dug below the slippery ash to find embers glowing and smouldering.
“The heat, the ash, it’s all coming up in your face,” he said. “The work is very hard labour. It’s very dirty. It’s long.”
These are twelve-hour days of digging – the eighth in a row for Desjarlais – scooping water out of puddles with their hard hats if necessary and mixing it with the dirt to squelch the fire and prevent it from “torching” or spreading underground through the muskeg and peat moss.
When he first arrived at the site, Desjarlais said the fire was candling, burning the tips of the birch, spruce and pine trees, and leaping from tree top to tree top.
“It takes off, it just goes running,” he said.
Kevin Quintilio, incident commander for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, said the fire travelled at speeds of one kilometre an hour, flying with winds of 30 to 40 kilometres per hour and gusts up to 100 kilometres per hour.
“That’s fast,” Quintilio said from base camp at the Fox Creek airport, explaining that fires typically spread at 10 to 25 metres each hour. The last time such a severe fire hit the area was in 1968 near Vega. That one set records, Quintilio said.
This time around, the fact that the winds continued through the first few nights made the conditions particularly unusual. When Quintilio first tried to fly around the fire to map it out, he had to pull out due to danger.
But since last Saturday, when 14 fires started in the area, 12 helicopters have been water bombing the major fires and 20 ground crews have been getting dirty, with 50 more firefighters expected to join soon. Dozers and big equipment have dug a deep line around 60 per cent of the perimeter, or about 50 kilometres in total. Quintilio hopes to have this fire under control by this weekend with no hot spots smouldering underground.
“It was a real challenge,” he said, describing how workers with many oil and gas companies in the area were evacuated. None of their property has been damaged.
Desjarlais said he loves the work, though he’d rather prevent fires.
“I’m here as emergency,” he said. “I enjoy doing it but I don’t enjoy doing it.”
He thinks of his six-month-old daughter Chloe at home in Edmonton and hopes she never lives through what the people in Slave Lake have experienced.
“In a way I think I’m helping save the environment in my own little way,” Desjarlais said. His crew have been saving their empty water bottles and juice boxes and will donate the recycling money to those who lost their homes.
“Kind of like I’m saving the world in my own little (way),” he said.
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