Local fire department sends structural firefighters to help protect homes

By Steve Hubrecht
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A crew of local firefighters from the Invermere fire department spent a week in August helping protect communities in and around the Logan Lake area from the Tremont Creek wildfire that forced residents there to flee.

Although the Tremont Creek wildfire is now classified as ‘being held’, earlier this summer it was blazing out of control, and the communities in the Logan Lake area were forced to evacuate.

Wildfire fighters from around B.C. descended on the area to help battle the blaze, as did structural firefighters, including four from the Invermere fire department.

These structural firefighters were not on the frontlines in the same sense as the wildfire fighters, but nevertheless played a very crucial role in protecting homes.

The firefighters — Captain Erik McLaughlin, Jordan Smith, Nick Melnyk and Janice Dallaire — left Invermere on Friday, Aug. 13, at 5:30 a.m. in the morning, having learned of their deployment just the night before — and arriving in Logan Lake early that same afternoon along with the Type One fire engine that normally served as the Invermere fire department’s backup engine (the Invermere fire department kept all its normal fire engines, in case they were needed for local fires in the Columbia Valley).

Such deployments of local municipal firefighters to other towns around the province in the paths of wildfires are not uncommon explains McLaughlin.

“Every summer we register with the office of the Fire Commissioner to be deployed, and then we have to be ready to go as resources are requested,” he says. 

By the time the four Invermere firefighters were on the scene, the Tremont fire had grown to more than 30,000 hectares. The day before they arrived an official evacuation order had been issued, forcing all residents to immediately leave the area.

After being briefed on the situation, the firefighters went to work, setting up sprinklers on the southeast flank of the town, with the aim of slowing down the fire should it appear on that side of Logan Lake.

“After that we spent most of the first three days doing structure protection in various communities. It was a lot of setting up sprinklers in case the fire moved into a certain area, or taking down sprinklers in areas where 

the fire had already passed through and then moving those sprinklers somewhere else,” says McLaughlin.

“We also helped further Fire Smart the various communities,” adds Smith. “We would move any flammable materials away from the houses, moving wood that was stacked against the house to the back of the yard, things like that. Essentially we were ‘Fire Smart’ing the areas we went to. It was eye-opening. There were quite a lot of homes that had done some great Fire Smarting. By a few, had large open decks, huge stacks of wood, flower beds right next to the house.”

“It was a great experience overall. We got to work with many different fire crews from around B.C. and it was really interesting to see how things might play out if something like that were to ever happen here in the Columbia Valley,” says Dallaire.

“It’s quite possible that the same thing could happen here. The landscape is the same, the population and how it’s spread out is the same,” adds Smith.

“It was a good experience. What I took away from it is that communities really do need to take Fire Smart seriously. What happened in Logan Lake can happen here,” says Melnyk.

Dalliare added that coming back to Invermere was “bittersweet” because “it was nice to be home, but at the same time we had formed bonds with the other fire crews, and there was a feeling of there still being work to do.”

“Of course, you always want to help as much as you can,” adds Melnyk.

“It’s definitely a feeling of accomplishment,” says McLaughlin, adding there were a total of 160 firefighters on scene along with the four from Invermere and they were told by the Fire Commissioners’ Office that a group had never blended together so well.

The firefighters also had the unique experience of being part of the ‘welcome home’ line, welcoming Logan Lake residents back into town after the evacuation order was lifted.

“That’s not something you are typically part of, as a structural firefighter, and it was really overwhelming,” says McLaughlin. “There were a lot of cheers and some people even stopped their cars, got out and hugged us.”