11
You own the fuel, you own the fire.
—Urban fire specialist’s adage
Downtown, at Mix 103, “things were getting worse and worse,” Chris Vandenbreekel recalled. “We couldn’t see the sun anymore, there was ash raining down, and there was this red hue downtown. Hosts and different staff members couldn’t handle what was going on; one staff member pulled her knees up to her chest and just started rocking in the fetal position. They were worried that their houses were gone, whether their families were safe. There were a couple of us that were just like, ‘No, we gotta keep going, we gotta keep doing this,’ and we’re getting more and more evacuation orders: Waterways [the oldest community in Fort McMurray, due south of downtown] gets the evacuation order; downtown is close to getting an order. Wood Buffalo [near the golf course] getting its evacuation order—Thickwood…It was crazy, trying to do this as a new employee.”
Vandenbreekel had been in town for all of seven months; there were still neighborhoods whose names and locations he did not know.
A mile and a half south of the radio station, in a wedge of floodplain formed by the Hangingstone River and Highway 63, firefighters from all over the city were converging on Fire Hall 1. Centrally located, with ready access to Beacon Hill and Abasand, Hall 1 is the oldest in town; inside, it has the feel of an open-plan clubhouse. In the lounge, a semicircle of La-Z-Boy recliners are aimed toward a wide-screen TV surrounded by shelves and cabinets full of trophies and memorabilia, the walls hung with portraits of past chiefs. Steps away is a well-equipped kitchen that adjoins a sunny dining area with a long communal table. The weight room is through a side door, and bunkrooms and showers are down the hall. It looks like a wonderful place to spend a weekend with good friends. But its comforts are deceptive: you can be settling into a weight session, a meal, a movie, or a nap—at any time of day or night—when the alarm will sound. Depending on the tone, it will be for ambulance or fire, and many members are trained for both types of calls. While everyone has a shift, no one has a schedule, and all live at the whim of the next car accident, heart attack, or barbecue fire.
On the afternoon of May 3, Hall 1 ceased to be merely a fire hall and became instead something closer to the Alamo. Across the city, fire hall intercoms were barking: “All halls! All halls! Bring every apparatus and proceed to Hall 1!” Because only about 30 of Fort McMurray’s 180 members are on duty at any given time, it took some time to track people down. A couple dozen firefighters were out of town altogether; one chief was bobbing at a swim-up bar in Mexico when he learned that his city was on fire. Everyone who could answered the call and, by 2:00 p.m., the parking lot at Hall 1 was overflowing with every kind of pickup and fire truck. Chief Troy Palmer, based out of Hall 3, across the river, was off duty and had yet to be alerted.
Palmer’s days of wrestling hose and climbing ladders were behind him; as a shift chief in his forties, he was focused on the big picture, on assessing the scene in its entirety. His piercing blue eyes informed an analytical mind, and, when he wasn’t on duty, he read a lot, particularly military history. Historic campaigns and strategy provided him with frameworks for making sense of the world, and they would come in handy for making sense of this fire: the chaos, which mimicked the fog of war; the all-too-common mistake of underestimating one’s adversary; the experience of being outflanked, outgunned—of being besieged. The terrible realization that you are, in fact, surrounded.
Even though Beacon Hill was now on fire, with smoke and embers crossing the highway, the situation was hard to appreciate from Palmer’s home in Timberlea, eight miles away. Out there, in the northwest corner of town, the subdivisions had been going in so fast that maps couldn’t keep up with them, but just beyond the surveyor’s stakes lay raw wilderness. If Palmer walked out his front door and headed down Chestnut Way, past the rows of one- and two-story starter homes to the edge of his subdivision, he would come up against a kind of terra incognita. To the north, beyond the current frontier of Walnut Crescent, lay a DMZ of scraped, drained, and leveled earth awaiting the next development boom. To the west stretched a virtually limitless expanse of dog-hair forest and muskeg—moose and beaver country that favors the amphibious and well insulated, and discourages casual exploration. Once beyond the tenuous membrane of suburbia, you were bushwhacking—all the way to Buffalo Head Prairie, two hundred miles to the northwest. En route, you wouldn’t see another swing set, cul de sac, paved road, or settlement of any kind. Out there, out of sight, the mining companies and wild creatures hold sway, roaming at will across a landscape unmarked save for the ubiquitous hatchwork of seismic lines.
Troy Palmer’s four-day shift wasn’t scheduled to begin until 6:00 that evening, but he had a feeling he would be called in sooner. On May 2, he had seen Fire 009 from the tower at Hall 5 on Airport Road—the growing plume, the water bombers, a little too close for comfort, angling in for their drops across the steadily shrinking gap between the fire and the community he was hired to protect. Palmer’s eight-year-old daughter had been staying with him that week, and, even though May 3 was a school day, he decided to keep her home. She said she wasn’t feeling well, but the fires were also on his mind and he wanted his daughter close. Palmer knew that all across the index, fire weather conditions had shifted progressively further into fire’s favor, and he knew his brothers and sisters in the department were going to be busy. At lunchtime, he called his ex-wife and asked if she could get off work and pick up their girl as soon as possible. “She was at the door picking her up when I got my call from our computerized dispatch at two in the afternoon,” Palmer told me. “Normally, it’ll say, ‘Overtime opportunity. Call by such-and-such a day, such-and-such a time.’ But this time, the computer called and it goes, ‘Emergency, Hall One. Emergency, Hall One.’ I’ve never heard it say that before. So, when my ex left with my daughter, I jumped in my truck. Of course, by now they were starting to evacuate. Of course, I get stuck in traffic.”
Under normal conditions, Palmer had a twenty-five-minute drive ahead of him—but nothing was normal that day. The delay, and the solitude, gave him time to consider the TeleStaff call he was responding to: there had been no specific information and no accept/decline option. This was not an offer; it was a Mayday. Whatever was happening across the river trumped rank, priority, the union, family—pretty much everything that gave shape and meaning to these men’s and women’s lives. Alone in his truck, stuck in traffic, Palmer had yet to understand that this wasn’t so much a fire alarm as it was the mobilization of a militia in the face of an invading army. It wasn’t until he reached the river that he would understand what they were up against.
By then, word was catching up with the fire, and evacuation orders were, for most people, already moot. When Palmer made a left off Millennium Drive onto Confederation Way, he found himself in a slow river of cars, trucks, and SUVs that filled all three eastbound lanes. Everyone was headed toward the highway, and also toward the fire, because that was the only way out of town. Scattered throughout this creeping procession were other firefighters who had just received their TeleStaff alerts.
Palmer had made this cross-town drive just the day before. This was Forestry’s third day working Fire 009, but the fire department had been busy, too, marshaling resources and setting up sprinkler lines around key infrastructure lying in the fire’s predicted path. Working overtime, Palmer had spent much of May 2 at the brand-new transfer station and recycling facility south of town, removing dozens of pumps and sprinklers along with thousands of feet of hose that the previous shift had set up and primed on May 1. Due to a change in the predicted winds, that entire defensive system had to be drained, coiled, and repacked. But that was yesterday. Today, it was as if the narrative of this fire had leaped ahead of itself, carried on the wind into a future that arrived far more quickly than the human beings watching it, and fighting it, had anticipated.
The gravity of the moment hit Palmer as he rounded a gentle bend in the river by the water treatment plant, just downstream from the evacuated golf course. The plant—new and state of the art like so much of Fort McMurray’s infrastructure—lies on the left bank of the Athabasca River. In addition to purifying city water, the plant’s huge new pumps initiate the pressure needed to drive water across the city and up onto the hilltops and ridges where so much new development has taken place. Less than five hundred yards farther downstream was the highway and Fort McMurray’s single most crucial piece of connective tissue, the bridge, the only road link between the west side neighborhoods and the rest of the world. Directly above the bridge, opposite the treatment plant, loomed the steep face of Abasand Heights. From this vantage, veins of bituminous sand are visible in the ridge’s eroded west face while the gentler slopes are covered in forest, but that’s not what Palmer saw. “All along the river, the entire hillside was burning,” he told me. “That’s when I phoned my ex and I said, ‘Pack up the trailer and pack up our daughter. You should be leaving town. Don’t bother going south, because that’s trapped already. Go north.’ ”
“North,” beyond the mines and man camps, was a dead end at the First Nations community of Fort McKay, thirty miles up the road, but that was a problem Palmer’s ex, Vandenbreekel’s wife, and thousands of other evacuees would need to deal with later. At that moment—about 2:45 p.m.—Centennial Park was in flames, Beacon Hill was igniting, and wind-driven embers were showering Abasand’s rooftops in visible gusts, like so much flaming snow. This midday squall of flying fire was now impacting the entire west side of the municipality, from the Gregoire neighborhood, down by Airport Road, all the way to Dickinsfield, one subdivision south of Timberlea, where Palmer lived. Palmer was trying to make sense of something he had never seen before, but Jamie and Ryan Coutts, who had arrived at Hall 1 about an hour ahead of him, were witnessing a repeat of the same scenario that had incinerated a third of their town in a matter of hours. Only this fire was ten times bigger.
By the time Palmer made it over the bridge and through the traffic to Hall 1, hundred-foot flames were cascading down Beacon Hill toward Highway 63. One eyewitness described it as a “wave of flame.” Another, who caught it on video as it came down the highway side, described it as flowing “literally, like lava.” The video bears this out: the trees ablaze over a hillside that appears molten and in motion, rolling down to the roadway. Meanwhile, wind-driven embers showered the bumper-to-bumper traffic and the businesses downtown as the firefighters massing at Hall 1 deployed their hoses, not to spray down the surrounding buildings, but to protect their fire trucks and the hall itself—a first for any member of that department. “Standards were gone,” recalled Palmer, who arrived in the middle of this. “Normally, you get a 911 call, they sort it out very structurally. Now, it was crazy: ‘We need help here! We need help there! We need more backup in Abasand!’ And the look on people’s faces was just unbelievable—fear, uncertainty: What do we do? It was so unconventional.”
In order to avoid situations like this, many state, provincial, and municipal fire services follow a protocol called “Blue Card Command.” Developed by the Brunacini brothers, a legendary firefighting family out of Phoenix, Arizona, and building off of California’s popular Incident Command System (ICS), Blue Card Command is a comprehensive approach to decision making and resource deployment, providing a step-by-step, if-then order of operations for each member responding to a call, whether they are first on scene or backup, whether it is a house fire or a chemical spill. The Blue Card system is widely used across the U.S., and Alberta adopted it in 2011, but as versatile as it is, there was no protocol for a situation like Fire 009. “Blue Card is generally how we manage things,” Palmer told me, “but this fire—it was kind of like, ‘Okay guys, throw the textbooks in the fire because that’s as good as they are right now.’ ”
Instead, firefighters, police, and other first responders fell back on deeply ingrained hierarchies. “Everyone understands the fundamentals of paramilitary organization,” Palmer explained, “so you knew if you showed up and you saw two stripes [captain], that’s the guy you got to answer to—even for some comfort and for some reassurance—‘Okay, now I know where I got to go and what I got to do.’ But beyond that, it was just—whatever.”
There was a lot of “whatever” in Fort McMurray that day. In the face of this unprecedented chaos, Palmer resorted to fundamentals: “Okay,” he thought to himself, “I need my equipment to fight fires.” Soldiers are trained to bond with their weapons; firefighters never respond to a call without their bunker gear. But Palmer’s bunker gear—the forty-plus pounds of protective clothing and breathing apparatus worn by structural firefighters—was still at Hall 5 on Airport Road, where he had left it the day before. Because many other off-duty firefighters were in the same situation, Palmer figured he would drive down there and grab all the gear he could find, and he requested permission to do this from Hall 1’s battalion chief. The chief pointed toward a rescue truck and Palmer grabbed the first firefighter he could find and drove off into the whirl of smoke and embers.
As the fire burned its way through dense stands of black spruce and into the trailer homes of Centennial Park and then the houses of Beacon Hill, the smoke grew progressively blacker and more acrid. For the fire, it was a virtually seamless transition from one highly volatile fuel to another. The dark and increasingly toxic smoke created an artificial twilight suffused with an unearthly orange glow. Visibility was reduced to the point that headlights were required; even though sunset was still seven hours away, streetlights were illuminating automatically. There appeared to be several layers of smoke and, down at street level, gray clouds rolled quickly over the thickening traffic. The air was filled with drifting ash and large embers clattered off the hoods and roofs of vehicles, and even cracked windshields.
Driving south toward Hall 5, Palmer didn’t know where the smoke would end. The man next to him, a relatively new recruit, was a stranger to him. “Initially it was like, ‘What are we going to see?’ ” Palmer recalled. “ ‘Are we going to see the other side of this?’ ” Ascending the long hill out of the river valley, they finally got upwind of the smoke; Palmer knew where he was, but nothing was the same. “It was just eerie,” he said, “because everything was burning on [the west] side of the highway.” By then, the four-story Super 8, the Denny’s, and the Flying J gas station were smoking ruins. Meanwhile, spot fires were igniting on the east side of the highway. There was not a fire truck to be seen. Palmer was especially dismayed by the “Welcome to Fort McMurray” sign. “One side had burned completely,” he said, “and it was just hanging there with little pieces burning on it. The tourist information booth had already burned.”
Palmer knew this road intimately, but now he felt disoriented. Landmarks are how we navigate and scale ourselves to landscape; their steady, dependable presence projects a sense of permanence and inviolability, which helps to anchor us in space and time. We don’t call them “songlines,” as they are known in Australia, but they serve a similar psychic role: we know when we see a familiar feature that the next one—a sign, a gas station, a tree, a hotel—will be coming along shortly, and in this way we stitch our homeworld together. Even though we may only name them when giving visitors directions, these are the waypoints that guide us through our daily rounds. Between their disappearance and the smoke, Palmer was becoming a stranger in his own hometown. This was happening now on a city-wide scale: the memory palace was burning down.
When Palmer arrived at Hall 5, he raided the gear locker, filling the back of his rescue truck with all the bunker gear he could find. “Then,” he said, “we drove back down to Hall 1 and threw it all in the middle of the floor. That’s the last time I looked at bunker gear for the rest of the fire.” It’s hard to articulate how irregular this is, but it is comparable to a soldier going into combat without a helmet and flak jacket. “Because we never needed it anyway,” Palmer said. “That’s how unconventional it was.”
In structural firefighting, the kind Palmer and his fellow firefighters were trained for, there is almost always more equipment and manpower than there is fire. When you get a call, it is usually to a house or a building, and if you show up with a pumper but you need a ladder, it will be there in minutes. Likewise, if you need a Bronto—an aerial platform—or another pumper, the resources are there to gang up on the fire and knock it down. Yes, you may lose the building—if the fire doesn’t destroy it, the water usually will—but, guaranteed, you will beat that fire: one more victory for the team. And this delineates two of the biggest differences between municipal firefighters and their counterparts in Forestry: time and scale. Structural fires are usually dealt with in a matter of hours; forest fires, despite a stated goal of “out by ten,”[*] may require days or weeks to bring under control. In the boreal forest, it can take months to fully subdue a major wildfire. Likewise, where structural firefighting is comparable to a rugby match—muscular, confrontational, and contained, with the goal visible at all times—wildland firefighting is more like lacrosse as it was originally conceived: not on a field per se, but across a landscape where it was not so much “played” as waged—like a running battle whose outcome is neither visible nor certain. These differences are evident in the equipment they deploy, and also in the firefighters’ respective builds. Forestry crews may spend days at a time in the bush or the mountains moving quickly through country accessible only by foot or helicopter, while municipal firefighters are seldom more than a hose length from their trucks and a short drive from their kitchens. Form follows function: where wildfire fighters are built for endurance in rugged terrain, munis are built to scrimmage and scrum. This is one reason you won’t see many powerlifters like Mark Stephens on a Forestry crew, but you will often see more women. Because of these and many other factors, the techniques, equipment, and even the mind-set required to fight their respective fires are fundamentally different. When these worlds collide, as they did that afternoon in Fort McMurray, lines and methods blur, and massive destruction and confusion can ensue.
This zone of collision has been given a name: the “WUI” (rhymes with phooey), an acronym for “wildland-urban interface” (though some call it “wildland-urban in your face”). On a map, the WUI represents the fault line between the forest and the built environment, but over the past thirty years it has also come to represent the sweet spot in North American real estate development: hiking trails out the back door and a scooter-friendly cul-de-sac in front. Today, more than a third of American homes and more than half of Canadian homes are located in the WUI. It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral. When a wildfire enters a residential community, the result—for the fire—is a smorgasbord of kiln-dried fuel topped with tar shingles, garnished with rubber tires and gas tanks. Meanwhile, the result for homeowners is shock and disbelief as the very structures designed to provide comfort and shelter turn on them in the most frightening way possible. In this situation, a bigger house does not mean more protection, it means a greater concentration of fire-ready fuel. These effects are most dramatic in residential areas built from modern, highly flammable materials in the middle of ecosystems that naturally regulate themselves with wildfire—places like Australia, the American West, and the Canadian boreal forest. As homeowners in these regions are learning every summer now, when the WUI burns, it does not burn like a forest fire or a house fire, it burns like Hell.
We learned this lesson the hard way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when forests, houses, and towns burned repeatedly across North America. But we forgot it in the relatively cool and rainy twentieth century as suburban expansion coincided with improved fire suppression. “Watching houses and then communities burn [is] like watching polio or plague return,” wrote Stephen Pyne, fire’s most eminent living chronicler, in 2016. “This was a problem we had solved, then forgot to—or chose not to—continue the vaccinations and hygiene that had halted its terrors.” These forgotten practices were simple ones: Don’t build your house in the woods, surround it with open fields; not only does this make for convenient planting and pasturage, but those cleared lands also serve as excellent firebreaks. Roofs made of tin or slate go a long way toward foiling embers.
None of these time-tested methods were used in Fort McMurray. With the exception of downtown, virtually every neighborhood is a perfect example of a WUI community. By 3:00 p.m. on May 3, Beacon Hill was a raging WUI fire; Centennial Park was all but gone; and Waterways, Abasand, and Thickwood were next. When Troy Palmer arrived at Hall 1, sometime after 2:30, Jamie Coutts and the Slave Lake crew were already in Beacon Hill, and Paul Ayearst’s family was trying to escape it. Barely a mile down the highway from Hall 1, the single entrance to Beacon Hill was a serpentine two-lane ascent with breakdown lanes and grassy shoulders flanked by mature forest. By the time Coutts got up there, the moment for setting up sprinklers had clearly passed. Both the neighborhood and the firefighting effort were in a state of shock and chaos. Traffic was a confusion of fire trucks and rescue vehicles, evacuating residents, RCMP officers going from house to house looking for stragglers, and other residents racing home from downtown. It seemed as if each person was at a slightly different stage of awareness of what was happening, and of how they might respond.
It is hard to overstate the totality of the disorientation people were experiencing: the roar and crackle of the fire; the wind, searingly hot and alive with sparks and ash; the black and acrid smoke that stole breath and reduced visibility to a car length; the flames a hundred feet high across a front that seemed to have no end or edge. It was as if the world had been remade in fire, and now it was coming for Beacon Hill.
A rule of thumb for structural firefighting is that the gallons per minute (gpm) of water should match the British thermal units (Btus) being generated by the fire. On Beacon Hill, this equation was so hopelessly skewed in the fire’s favor that sending a fire department to face it was like sending plumbers to confront a bursting dam. Most of the hose streams deployed were evaporating long before they reached the flames. The situation facing those patchwork crews in Beacon Hill—now a textbook firetrap—was not so different than that facing the firefighters marching resolutely up the stairs of the World Trade Center: it was nothing they had dealt with before, it didn’t feel right, and the prospects weren’t good, but there were people up there, so they went. Service before self.
In such a lopsided situation, the firefighters’ ignorance may have been a kind of blessing. “I remember their faces,” Jamie Coutts told me, “and I mostly remember because that’s what my face must have looked like when it slammed into our town in 2011—because it was just disbelief, right? It was like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to lose ten houses here, but we’ll get it.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re going to lose five hundred houses here. You guys don’t get it.’ ”
Once the crews were on scene, it was difficult for them to see the houses, or even each other, and it was impossible to hear anything over the growing roar of the fire, which witnesses compared variously to a jet engine and a freight train. The unremitting din was further intensified by the constant snap and crack of sundering timber—trees and houses alike—and by the sporadic explosions of electrical transformers and fuel tanks. The heat between those burning houses, now comparable to the planet Venus, was unbearable, and so was the smoke. It quickly became clear that, not only was there no way to fight this fire, there was no time. There was time only to get the residents out before they were overrun.
This spontaneous transition from firefighting operation to lifesaving operation has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century urban fire—from Portugal and Greece to Australia and California. Some residents had fled already, but who, exactly? In order to find out, firefighters were going door to door. The RCMP were on hand—both to manage traffic and to aid in the searches. The risk of becoming trapped, of being surrounded by the fire on this thickly wooded hilltop, was real and growing more likely by the minute. Steve Sackett, a firefighter in the first wave with the Slave Lake crew, was reconnoitering with Jamie Coutts when the Shell station by the entrance road exploded, producing a shock wave that could be felt hundreds of yards away. “We could feel it in our bodies,” Sackett later wrote, “and it followed with a fireball hurling into the sky…Without flinching, [Coutts] continued talking to us, saying, ‘I hope nobody died.’ ” Fire trucks, invisible in the smoke, began sounding their airhorns in three-blast intervals—the Mayday signal. The only way off this isolated plateau was that single entrance road at the south end, right by the burning gas station. The only way out was through; the entire hilltop was igniting.