Dustin Ned and Ray James stand in front of the cafeteria tent at the fire camp after a long day of battling the Testalinden Creek wildfire. Photo by Trevor Nichols
At around 7 p.m. on August 30 the Testalinden Creek fire camp was relatively peaceful. As helicopters drummed in the distance a clutch of security guards conferred near the entrance and dishes clinked in the kitchen trailer.
The camp occupies a small lot of land near the Town of Oliver and its sprawl of tents and trailers is the nerve centre for the more than 200 people—firefighters, cooks, planners, safety experts, information officers and more—battling the Testalinden Creek wildfire.
It wasn’t until around 8 p.m. when BC wildfire crews start returning from their day’s work, that the purposeful quiet gave way to the hum of activity.
In the fading daylight the returning crews trudged into the camp wearing rugged work boots and long, thick uniforms. Soot clung to their clothes and skin.
Most set out to fight the fire at 7 a.m. that morning, heading straight into the heart of the place where no one else wanted to be.
As Ray James said, they are the “guardians of the fire.”
Just after 8 p.m. James and fellow firefighter Dustin Ned returned from their long day battling the blaze.
James is a big guy, with gleaming eyes and a hearty smile. Ned is taller, slighter and dryer than his boisterous buddy, but both of the Lillooet natives carry themselves with the same combination of weariness and confidence unique to their trade.
Sitting at a picnic table outside the cafeteria tent, the pair explain what a typical day in the life of a BC Wildfire Service firefighter looks like.
That morning, like every morning at the camp, James had been up at “oh-five-hundred” to eat breakfast, pack his lunch and prep his crew’s truck before the day’s work, loading it with tools, fuel, hoses and anything else they might need for the day.
By 7 a.m., after a brief meeting, he and his crew-mates drove up to Osoyoos and turned onto a side road heading towards the burn area. After about an hour and a half they arrived at their safety zone, which Ned explained is a “fuel-free area” that has been cleared of any trees, grass or shrubbery that might burn.
They had another safety meeting, going over important on-the-ground safety information before setting out into the eerie landscape of burnt forest to begin the day’s task.
“It’s kind of like a scary movie. All you see is black trees . . . it kind of looks like winter on the ground and then the trees are just all black, kind of like a silhouette,” James said, explaining that the whole forest floor is like black charcoal.
According to Fire Information Officer Heather Rice, a lot of a wildfire firefighter’s work is creating “guards.” A guard is essentially a trench, dug deeply into the ground—right down to the mineral soil—to stop the spread of the fire.
They can be as skinny as a few inches or as wide as a road. It all depends on the intensity of the fire. Bigger ones are dug with heavy machinery, but in places where the equipment can’t go firefighters do the digging.
The Testalinden Creek wildfire has been burning for weeks, and Rice said by now some guards are as wide as roads. But burned-out trees present an enormous danger to firefighters in the area, so a large part of what they do is “danger tree assessment” and “danger tree falling.”
That is the first thing James and Ned did the morning of August 30. They scouted the area they would be working in for danger trees, so they could be felled later.
After that most of their work is digging guards and putting out hot spots. Their squad, a 20-person team split into four smaller groups, was working in the northern area of the fire.
Ned explained that crews will set up a pump in a lake or creek with a pipe leading into the burn area. Smaller hoses branch off from that pipe, allowing firefighters to hose down hot spots.
Firefighters will dig guards in the area and lay hose behind them, allowing them to get to the hot spots and take care of them.
A hot spot is a place where the fire is still smouldering underground. Firefighters look for signs of the spot (Ned said that one method is to feel the ground with your hand), dig them out and hose them down.
Rice explained that there’s actually not that much water used in fighting the actual flames from forest fires. Usually they are so hot that any water evaporates before it can do much good, so water bombers and helicopters are used primarily to cool things down for the firefighters or put out small spot fires.
Those helicopters were just ending their day as Ned and James returned from their 13-hour job. The two looked beat, but James still wore a big smile. He said that fighting fires is one of the best jobs he’s ever had.
Ned agreed. He said he tried for years to get on a crew before finally managing a decade ago. At one of the first fires he ever responded to he was struck by lightning. He was “mopping up” by a large tree that was struck. The electrical current travelled from it through the nozzle of his hose into his arm.
“It sent me like 20 feet down the hill,” he recalled with a chuckle.
“I couldn’t feel my arm for like 24 hours, and my hand I couldn’t feel for a long while,” he said. But he loved the job so much that even that didn’t scare him away.
“I was off for five days and then back to work,” he said.
“The camaraderie, the brotherhood of the reds and blues. You probably won’t get a greater bunch of people anywhere. With all the fear and everything else that is out there, it just brings us closer together, like a tight family,” James added.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re from the South; the East; the coast; South Africa; anywhere. As soon as you get us all together we’re just one big, happy family.”
By Trevor Nichols
