British Columbia in Flames by Claudia Cornwall

Author:Claudia Cornwall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wildfires, British Columbia, Social aspects
ISBN: 9781550178951
Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
Published: 2020-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Brian Fuller, an ex-logger and heavy equipment operator, helped to keep the Old School in Riske Creek safe. The Van Embers had gotten to know Brian in the three months they’d been living in Riske Creek and he had become a friend. At Kurt’s suggestion, I went to visit Brian at the school, about a kilometre up Stack Valley Road from the Chilcotin Lodge. A bear of a man, Brian was well versed in the ways of fires. He told me that you had to be strategic. “Once that fire drops down from the crown and gets to the ground, then you can manage it a lot easier. You can put it out with fireguards. But if it’s a full-blown hundred feet high, just get out of the way. It’s too hard, too dangerous.” He was wise in the psychology of firefighting too. He said, “Kurt is a good example of somebody that was really having nightmares. I said to him, ‘Drive up the road, you’ll see the fires right there.’ Everybody has this image of a fire, that it’s so crazy—dramatized sometimes on the media. I told him, ‘Go see it when the wind has died down, especially in these areas where there’s a lot of grassland, where you can manage it pretty quick with dozers. Just drive up there for five minutes, go take a look and see what the fire is and come back.’ It wasn’t as crazy as he imagined.”

Brian had already used a dozer to put a guard around the school, but he was worried about the fire farther west, where efforts to contain it were in danger of being overwhelmed. The day he dropped off the pump and other supplies, he also came to get Chris. “I need you, so let’s go.”

“Okay,” Chris said. He had no training in fire suppression, but he was young and energetic. Brian needed bodies,” he explained to me, shrugging. When Chris hopped into Brian’s truck, it was 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning. Chris was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, not exactly regulation gear for the task ahead of him, but Brian paid no heed. He drove forty kilometres west on Highway 20 and dropped Chris off at a spot behind Lee’s Corner.

“When I got there they had just finished the awesome eight lanes of fireguard that was to protect Riske Creek,” Chris said. “The guard was in an open field so flat,” he remembered, “you could literally land your plane on it.” The idea was to stop the fire and prevent the grass from burning and setting the trees on fire. “But it still jumped,” Chris said. “When I got there, they were trying to put out the fire in the gully. I was with some guys who knew what they were doing. They had an eight-hundred-gallon water tank and were sucking water from the gully and spraying with the hoses. They gave me a high-vis vest and a piss tank. I would follow them around and put out spot fires.

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