Inside the Inferno by Damian Asher & Omar Mouallem

Author:Damian Asher & Omar Mouallem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Though I had my radio, I didn’t know how to use it and needed to stop at Mac Island for a tutorial. I was also desperate to know what was going on with staging. When there’s a catastrophe on this scale, it’s not enough simply to have a central place to distribute and organize apparatus, but you need to replenish basic things—masks and fresh socks, for example—plus serve proper meals to fuel your personnel.

It was late morning and the inversion hadn’t lifted yet, so time allowed it. There was even a moment to spray water into the flaming foundations of the two houses that perished in Grayling Terrace nearby Mac Island. Some of the crew wanted to roll by their own houses, make sure they were still standing, and Hitchcock continued to earn that totally imaginary World’s Best Ex-boyfriend honour with a stopover at his ex’s house to turn on her sprinkler and text her photographic evidence that it was still standing. My own home was in the clear. The fire, so far, had stayed on the west side of the city, and, technically speaking, Saprae Creek, the furthest eastern community, wasn’t under mandatory evacuation yet. I texted Melanie to let her know.

Saprae is looking good

Are they letting anybody into Fort McMurray?

It could be a while

Buy the kids fresh clothes if you need

We arrived at Mac Island in the late morning, but already the weather was creeping up to 32 Celsius again. Our skin was as red as the sky, and I was sweating even before the first battle of the day—which was sure to come around noon again.

Just off Franklin Avenue, sitting on a 240-acre islet where the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers fork, Mac Island is so big that inside, street signs point you around to either of the two NHL-sized rinks or two field houses, towards eight curling sheets, to an indoor running track or squash courts, to ballrooms and, for when the freeze scares even children away, to an indoor playground. When it opened in 2009, the sleek building—a curvy glass and steel body and a wave-like awning over a massive amphitheatre stage—was a show of the new oil capital’s prowess. But with the economy floundering, it’d become one of the more affordable ways to spend an afternoon with the family. Still, I’d never seen it like this before.

The semicircular parking lot was stuffed with fleet vehicles, fire engines, tow trucks, dozers, news vans and double-parked, abandoned civilian cars, and was spray-painted heavily to label stocks of equipment. Men in uniform confabbed outside the reflective glass exterior. Inside was abuzz with activity—firefighters I’d never seen before slipping into bunker gear, or ones I recognized pulling unused cots out of boxes and assembling them for places to rest. People barked orders across halls; others talked loudly into their phones trying to be heard over the racket. It was hard to tell who was working for whom.

A woman pushed a dolly of water bottle pallets, and our

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