Chapter 2 Get out, it’s coming!
For a long time no one knew what ignited that small blaze on land belonging to the Ashcroft First Nation. Lightning wasn’t the cause, as the sky was clear on July 6, 2017, the day it started. The days before were free of electrical disturbances too. Nor was it likely that a spark from a passing CN train was responsible as the fire originated above a railway tunnel, a good distance away from the tracks. Early in October 2017, I talked to Josh White, chief of the Ashcroft Volunteer Fire Department. “I don’t know whether this was an intentional start or not,” he said. “We’ve had multiple fires in that area in years past. Where the fire started there wasn’t much sagebrush, just grass, because the sagebrush has been burnt off so many times. We don’t know what this was. I don’t like to think it was criminal because I don’t like thinking that way. Was it intentional? I don’t know. But we know it was human-caused.” Did a vehicle’s exhaust set something on fire? Was it a carelessly tossed cigarette? A campfire that got out of hand?
In September 2019, after a complex investigation that lasted over two years, the RCMP announced that it had solved the mystery of what started one of the worst fires in BC’s history. As I write this, the RCMP is working with Crown prosecutors to see whether charges should be laid. We still don’t know the names of the persons involved.
As I spoke with Josh over lunch in the bustling local Tim Hortons, dishes clattered and conversations ebbed and flowed around us. He told me that he got a call from the Ashcroft Nation around 9:00 in the evening. “Basically I phoned it in to Forestry [the BC Wildfire Service] that night and gave them all the details. The fire was inaccessible to our engine,” he said.
During our long chat I learned that Josh has lived in Ashcroft ever since he was eleven, and he joined the local firefighters in 1998. I also found out that the fire was the third in a string of traumatic events he’d experienced over a period of five months. In March, he was the first person to enter the home of a family in the Venables Valley, just south of Ashcroft, where the parents and two children had died due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Then in May, after searching every day for nearly a month, he finally discovered the body of Clayton Cassidy, the Cache Creek fire chief, who had been swept away during a flood. Now this. “Psychologically, it’s been a hard year,” he admitted.
None of Josh’s engines are equipped with four-wheel drive and the July 6 fire was on rough terrain. “So I took Forestry and guided them onto the site with my personal vehicle, which has four-wheel drive,” Josh said. “They arrived shortly after midnight on the seventh and worked hard. As soon as they began hitting it with water that night, they suppressed the fire. I thought, ‘This is handled.’ At the time, it was only about one hectare in size—very small. The smoke column was going straight vertical, which means no wind. It was a very slow-moving, non-aggressive fire.”
The BC Wildfire Service fights an average of two thousand wildfires each year and aims to contain all of them by 10 a.m. the day after they are reported. It prides itself on succeeding with 94 percent of them.24 When Josh woke up the next morning, he looked south and felt relieved to see blue sky and not a whiff of smoke anywhere. At first, it seemed as if he had been part of another one of those success stories. But by 11:00, the temperature had soared to 34°C and the winds had picked up. Stoked by gusts from the south blowing between 50 and 60 kph, the mild fire of the previous evening had metastasized. “Must have been an ember got into the grasses and it exploded from there,” Josh said.
Ashcroft is drier than anywhere else in Canada except for the high Arctic. June, for instance, averages a total of just twenty-six millimetres of rain.25 But in 2017 it was even drier than usual. By July 7, not a drop of rain had fallen for thirty-five days.26 The parched desert hills were a powder keg.
Just after 11:30 a.m., Josh received another call from the Ashcroft Nation. A conflagration was now threatening their homes. Josh and his crew responded right away to save what they could. “When I first arrived in the rescue truck,” Josh remembered, “the fire was about two hundred feet away to the south. I got one cap off the hydrant, and I turned around and the fire was at the rear end of the fire truck. We retreated; we had to retreat three times off the reserve before we finally stood our ground, because the fire was so aggressive. I thought Forestry had it in the bag, but the next day, the fire was like a volcano. We’ve had countless fires on the reserve. We’ve nailed them every time. But this time, the way the wind direction was pushing it up the hill, everything worked in its favour and not in ours.”
That day, Dale Lyon, one of Josh’s captains, was driving a “tender,” a truck designed to transport water to a fire scene. When I talked to him and his wife Maggie on the phone, he told me that he was on-site “with a couple of younger fellows.” He said, “We were going from house to house, literally removing fuel. We knew this fire was still spreading in every direction and we thought, ‘Well we can do this. We can water things down, so we can keep on moving.’ By the time I got to the third house, one of the younger fellows tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Look, look behind you.’ The first house we had cleared was in flames. Yeah, like totally, and we’re only talking minutes.”
At that point, the BC Wildfire Service sent in air support armed with fire retardant. The firefighters on the ground got out of its way. But their work was not done. Around 1:30 in the afternoon, Josh got a call from his fire dispatch in Kamloops. Bradner Farms, a dairy on the north side of town, was ablaze. Tanks of coolant were exploding and a barn was burning. Apparently about twenty people worked on the farm and some of them had been trying to get the cows out of the burning barn. “The cows are trained to go into the building to be milked two or three times a day,” Josh explained. “It’s all automated. The cows kept wanting to go back in the building because it was milking time.” How the people were faring was unknown.
Josh sent Steve Aie, his brother-in-law, to help out at the dairy with a crew of four in the newest vehicle, Engine 3. Moments after they had taken off, Josh realized that his dispatcher was trying to call him again. But by then, Josh said, “A repeater site had burned up on the hillside, so now we didn’t have radio communications with our dispatcher. I called them on the cell phone, and they said, ‘Pull your truck that’s just left out of there because it’s dangerous. Everyone has reported out of the dairy farm now. Everyone’s safe. Get your crews out of there. It’s a real dangerous area to be going in.’ Right away, I tried calling them [the firemen on Engine 3] on the radio. But my repeater’s down, so I can’t talk to my crews either. On the top of the hillside, I looked up and there’s my repeater site on top of Elephant Hill. It’s just a ball of fire. I’m like, ‘Okay we’ve lost our radio communications.’ When I was on the phone with dispatch, I lost cell service too. I said, ‘We’ve got to get those guys out of there. We’ve got to tell them.’” For Josh, this moment was the worst during the entire fire. “I was afraid, not for my own life but for my guys. I sent them down the road into goodness knows what. Getting that call from dispatch saying, ‘Don’t send them there, that place is a death trap,’ when I’ve already sent them, and then losing communications at the key moment, as I was trying to call them, was horrible.”
Josh and several other firefighters took off down Highway 1 to catch up with Engine 3. On the way, Josh said, “We almost met our maker because some guy in a semi had dropped his trailers right there on the highway. And through the thick of the smoke, we couldn’t see them. We came through the smoke and there’s this abandoned trailer, and we swerved around it—on a blind corner. It was a crazy scary time.”
When Josh and the other volunteers reached the road leading up to the farm, the smoke cleared a bit and they could see Engine 3 heading toward them. “They made a good call,” Josh said to me. “We were happy to see that.”
When I phoned Steve Aie to get his recollections of the event, he said, “We were fine at first and then saw fire on both sides of the road. The road was full of smoke. You could feel the heat. The whole hill was on fire. The barn was fully engulfed. It was frightening to see. We turned around. We all decided we’re not going in. In fifteen years of firefighting, this was the fastest fire I’ve ever seen.”
While all this was happening, another flank of the fire was veering west over Elephant Hill, across Highway 97C, into Bonaparte Canyon and toward Boston Flats Trailer Park, home to seventy-six people. Sergeant Cat Thain, detachment commander of the Ashcroft RCMP, told me that one of her members had a home near Boston Flats and a couple of dogs. He’d decided to check on his dogs, and when he realized how fast the fire was moving, he grabbed them and drove into Boston Flats to warn the residents. “Get out. It’s coming!” he broadcast from his vehicle. While he was on his PA system, one of the other members of the Ashcroft RCMP called him to say, “Your house is gone.” His place had been destroyed in just twenty minutes. “And you know, he didn’t miss a day’s work after that,” Cat said later.
Josh, who was driving back to Ashcroft from Bradner Farms, also saw what was happening in Boston Flats. By then the fire was so close to the trailer park that all he could do was drive in and make sure everyone had left. He didn’t know that an RCMP officer had already been through, so he yelled into his PA system, “Get out. We can’t do anything for you. This is going to be bad. You need to leave now.” Thankfully, the residents had all evacuated and were safe. Josh sped away, getting himself out ten minutes before the fire hit. It consumed all but one trailer. The trailer park’s occupants were lucky to get out with their lives. Because it had only one road in and out, they could have very easily have been trapped.
Once Josh was back on the highway, he met his fire crews and told them, “This is it. We have to go back to Ashcroft. Without cell service and without our repeater, we need to be in our community.” Although Josh had a satellite communication system to fall back on, it only worked when the crews were in close proximity. “For about four or five hours, through the afternoon, we went defensive: I had a crew patrolling the downtown, along the river shore; we had pedestrians watching to make sure the fire wasn’t jumping; and then we had another crew patrolling north Ashcroft along the highway to make sure the flank wasn’t coming within striking distance of the town.”
The ten days that followed were long, Josh recalled. “Basically, what I was doing was taking the rescue truck—I’d pull into my driveway somewhere around 12:00 a.m. and 1:00 a.m., get out of the coveralls, go to bed, put them on at 6:00 a.m. and back out I’d go.” Josh and the other volunteers were constantly patrolling, extinguishing small blazes to make sure the fire did not reignite. In total, during the ten-day period when the firefighting was most intense, the eighteen members of the Ashcroft Volunteer Fire Department worked thirteen hundred hours, often on top of eight-hour shifts at their regular jobs. “We’re paid $7 an hour to go fight fire,” Josh said. “Our firefighting budget for the town normally is around $7,000 for a year. When we got done, it was $13,000 for the month of July. We just blew that budget out of the water.”27
Twelve of the Ashcroft Nation’s thirty-two houses succumbed on July 7; altogether, twenty-seven people lost their homes. All the structures in the village of Ashcroft were spared, but the town went without power for thirty hours and had no phone service for four days. This created a number of fairly serious inconveniences. The gas pumps didn’t work, for instance. And even when electricity was restored, you needed cash in hand to fill up. Without telephone lines, cards and bank machines didn’t work and tellers couldn’t access their systems. “You could have a million dollars in your bank account, you couldn’t get it,” Josh pointed out. Ironically, Ashcroft was never evacuated. Without electricity, the evacuation orders could not be printed.
No people died but Josh recalled, “We found a couple of dogs afterwards that didn’t make it. We tried to bury as many as we could find. We made graves, so people didn’t have to see that when they came home. One of the saddest images I ever saw in my life was on the reserve. Some horses were running; they were on fire, their tails were burning. But they survived.”
One of the strangest images I heard about was from Maggie Lyon, Fire Captain Dale Lyon’s wife. Early on during the fire, she had a hose out and was watching for hot spots on their property. “From where I was, I could see the fire going on the upper part of the hills and up Elephant Hill. And then the other finger came down and started coming right along the river and burning all that fuel. So there were times I could see it and there were other times where the smoke blew across the river. We were smoked out and couldn’t see too much. At one point, I could hear a train and I couldn’t figure out what the train was and then the smoke cleared. It was the Rocky Mountaineer [which operates luxury rail ‘cruises’ in BC and Alberta]. They had reached CN but the Rocky Mountaineer was not notified. So they came through and, yes, when the smoke cleared there was the train. They were actually driving along the tracks when there was fire on both sides.”