After a long cold winter, most Albertans hope for nothing more than a hot summer. Unfortunately, in some ways this one has already been hotter than usual.

By April of 2011, Alberta’s wildfire fighters had already battled 552 blazes across the province – 25 per cent more than what’s normal for that time of year. Worse still was the tragedy that struck Slave Lake in mid-May of the same year, when a raging wildfire destroyed nearly half the town.

While no fires were classified “out of control” as of early July, crews are still containing and extinguishing remaining and new blazes.

Here, three NAIT Forest Technology alumni share their firefighting stories: one who compares his job to a classic wartime sitcom, another who helped contain Alberta’s biggest fire in decades, and one more whose story proves that if you can’t take the heat, it’s best to stay out of the forest.

John Caldwell (’94)
Camp Manager

Usually, John Caldwell lives a relatively quiet life as a timber production auditor with Sustainable Resource Development (SRD) in Edmonton.

Then, in May 2011, he was told members of the provincial government department could be called up as fire camp managers. His call came at 10 o’clock that night.

The next morning he was off on an 18-day stint to what is now a nearly 88,000-hectare fire at Red Earth, about an hour and a half north of Slave Lake. Here, a few days before he was to head home, he shares that experience.

We’re at Bat Lake, in a recreational campground. A lot of its structures are burnt down. There are about 65 people in the camp: the firefighting crews stay in tents and the camp staff is in trailers. I’m not on the fire, so I don’t see much but smoke, but there’s a lot of sand and dust where we are. Everything’s gritty.

My job is to make sure crews are fed, watered, housed, showered, clothed and so on. I don’t dispatch crews to the fire. I think people think fighting wildfires only involves an army of guys trooping through the forest, and that’s true, but they don’t think of the logistics end – that’s a lynchpin. The closest I can think of to this job is Radar from MASH: you’re the point man for anybody and everything.

There have been some real surprises. For example, there are a lot of bears in the area, so I had to put up an electric fence to keep them out. I had to figure out how with nothing but a cellphone and my imagination.

Getting supplies for things like that is a headache.  You’re isolated, there are lots of road closures and businesses were closed in Slave Lake and Red Earth. You have to really think tasks through. If you need 10 elements to build a bear fence and you order nine, your fence doesn’t work.

I’ve been with the government for more than three years but this job in particular has been a steep learning curve. It’s extremely high stress. During my first week, I worked from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. That’s hard on crews, but we’ve got some really good people up here. They want to get the job done well, and they want to do it safely.

Gavin Hojka (’09)
Wildfire Ranger

We caught up with Gavin Hojka in early June 2011 in the duty room in Fort McMurray, where he was organizing crews and equipment for fires in the Waterways Management Area, which includes the oil sands.

The SRD wildfire ranger had just finished a tour on the Richardson fire, 60 kilometres north of Fort McMurray. At approximately 686,000 hectares – an area bigger than Prince Edward Island – it’s Alberta’s biggest fire in decades.

Hojka’s job was focused on containment, an operation based on depriving the blaze of fuel. With that fire recently classified “under control,” here is his account of helping to rein it in.

I was the division supervisor. I looked after multiple crews and heavy equipment like bulldozers, excavators, trek vehicles with water tanks, personnel movers and aircraft in the area I was assigned.

I’m rarely out there with a hose or swinging a pulaski – that’s like a fireman’s axe but it has a hoe on one end of it; it’s the main tool we use to dig and cut down trees. I’m the guy organizing everyone, giving them their assignments and making sure they’re doing them safely.

Overall, it’s hot and dry. Hopefully you’re not right in front of the flames but sometimes if it calls for that you’ve got to be pretty close. It’s exhausting work. You put in your 12 hours, come home, eat dinner and sleep. Then you get up and do the same thing.

Some of the things we’re doing are controlled burns followed up with dozer lines. We use the dozers to get down to mineral soil to create a barrier, and then the crews follow up with pump and hose and extinguish the fire edge where the dozers cut. When we do a direct attack, the dozer is working as close to the fire as possible.

We’ve been battling the Richardson blaze for a month now. This is the biggest fire in well over 50 years; no one in this business has seen this before. It’s going to be a long summer putting this out. And the fire’s burning into the ground two or three feet. There’s a good chance there will be smoke and heat out there for months.

Pat McIlwaine (’06)
Air Attack Officer

In 2010, during a trip to the offices of the Upper Hay Forest Protection Area at High Level, we met Pat McIlwaine. As an air attack officer stationed out of Peace River, he’s one of SRD’s most important eyes in the sky.

He’ll survey a blaze and call in firefighting crews delivered by helicopter (check out John Caldwell’s video footage by clicking the banner at the top of the page) and air-tankers loaded with fire retardant.

McIlwaine is used to flying shotgun in the “bird dog,” the agile turbo-prop that plays a key role in forest conservation, but he admits it’s a job most don’t have the stomach for. Here’s a harrowing story from the frontlines of Alberta’s fight against wildfires.

In my first year of training we were in a fire east of Edson, right along Highway 16. We were working it for about two hours – my bird dog plane and six air-tankers. One of the aircraft’s pilots suddenly said, “Lost an engine. Need to find a place to land.” I circled around. The plane’s propellers weren’t turning.

It was just plain luck that we were working on Highway 16. So, he turned into the wind and headed for the highway. We hadn’t stopped traffic at that point because the fire hadn’t reached the road, so there was traffic coming toward this plane as it was preparing to land.

We have a siren on the bird dog so we sounded it and buzzed the traffic so drivers would know there was a plane overhead. They stopped and the plane landed on the highway. For my first year of training it got my heart going quite a bit.