Chapter 22 I could wrap a wet towel around my head, go out into the lake
“We built a resort on Green Lake, a unique spot. I didn’t want to let Mother Nature take it without a fight. Everything I’ve wanted to do in my whole life was all here,” Brad Potter told me. He elected to stay on his property during the fires of 2017. “I felt I knew what I was doing,” he said. “I’m an ex-fire chief and my wife and I founded the Interlakes Volunteer Fire Department. I was either president or fire chief for nine years. I’ve fought wildfire and lots of structural fires. I had two fire pumps, tons of hoses.”
Brad and his wife, Gail, own a home-cum-lodge known as The Wind and the Pillows. They had their seventy-six-hundred-square-foot post-and-beam structure built in 2011 by Pioneer Log Homes of BC, a company featured on HGTV’s show Timber Kings. The house is on a peninsula on the southwest shore of Green Lake. Although you might not easily see it, the area is steeped in history. For centuries, Green Lake was a gathering place, the site of an annual meeting “where trade, political discussions, kinship ties, sports, spiritual, ceremonial and communal activities were shared and celebrated by Secwepemc from near and far.”66
Brad has been a realtor in the South Cariboo for twenty-five years. He and Gail are also enthusiastic musicians. Playing music together in high school drew them together and they still have a band, The Classmates, a popular choice for local events. Brad is talkative and gregarious. We spoke on the phone for an hour, and Gordon and I stayed at the lodge for a couple of nights in February 2018 to get more of a sense of what he had defended.
Brad told me that when an alert was issued for Green Lake on July 15, the South Green Lake Volunteer Fire Department came and said, “Get the hell out,” even though an alert doesn’t require you to leave, only to get ready for a possible departure. Brad and Gail gathered up their valuables and artwork and packed them into their boat, which was sitting on a trailer. The next morning, Gail said, “Let’s go, Brad.” He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t leave.” He handed her the keys. Gail hates driving with a trailer, but she didn’t argue with him; she just gave him a hug and left for Kamloops.
A week later, the two decided the fire was quite far away and the chance it would come as far as Green Lake was remote. It’s not going to happen, Brad thought. The Elephant Hill fire was estimated at fifty-eight thousand hectares, but on July 22 the Ashcroft Journal reported that for the last forty-eight hours, the fire hadn’t grown much and was staying within its perimeter.67 Gail returned. However, on July 29 an evacuation order was finally issued for South Green Lake. The Elephant Hill fire had grown to seventy thousand hectares and was breaching its containment lines north of the Bonaparte River. Its meekness of a few days prior had quite vanished. At midnight, the Potters’ phone rang. Brad said, “It was my daughter in Edmonton saying, ‘Get the fuck out of there. You’ve been evacuated.’” Fifteen minutes later, a fire truck pulled in and gave the Potters the same news. Once again, they hooked up their truck to the boat, which was still packed with valuables. Brad drove the truck and Gail took the car to their friends’ place on Horse Lake. Gail stayed there, but Brad went back home. “That was the start of my siege,” he said. He knew that once he decided to stay behind, he could not leave the premises. “The word was if you were caught off your property it was automatic—two nights in the can and you weren’t coming back. I know people who were caught and were put in the can.”
Then Brad got to work preparing for the worst. He had “fire-smarted” his own property. But the parkland around his place was a problem, as it turned out. Green Lake Provincial Park consists of eleven distinct sites scattered around the fifty-seven kilometres of lakeshore. While some of the sites are designated for camping, the Boyd Bay site, which surrounds the Potters’ place, is zoned as “natural environment.” According to the regulations, that meant Brad was supposed to let natural processes proceed unhampered. He wasn’t allowed to mow the grass or dispose of any dead trees. These, of course, were precisely the kinds of preparations that homeowners were being encouraged to undertake to prevent fires from spreading onto their properties. “We’d had a wet spring and everything grew quite lushly. And then there was no precipitation in this part of the province and everything died. I went, ‘If there’s a spark there, that’s an instantaneous fire.’” Brad ignored the rules. He decided to cut down the hayfield next door—“a quarter of an acre of grass that was two-and-a-half-feet tall, all dried out.” He had a mower with one rotary motor and a bag on it. He’d run it for forty feet, the bag would fill up, he’d empty it, and then he’d run it for another forty feet. It was hot, about 30°C, and the work was slow. But after a week, Brad had the hayfield cut back to lawn length, “I had two fire pumps and hoses and then I started sprinkling the crap out of everything.”
“It was at noon one day,” Brad said, “when a truck pulls into my property. It was a fire truck pulling a twenty-four-foot trailer with roll-up doors down the sides. You roll up the doors, there’s tray after tray, row after row of sprinkler heads and little hoses.” A crew had come to evaluate the main buildings on Green Lake for structural protection. “Then they saw what I had set up and said, ‘Christ you’ve got 98 percent of it, so we’re going to do your house right now.’ Five guys, twenty-five, thirty years old. They hop out and climb all over my buildings. They put sprinklers on the four peaks of the house, two on my shop, one on every cabin and every building, and hooked up to my fire hoses and the pumps. They supplied the sprinklers. Then they left to do the next-largest place. But before they got there, they got called down to Clinton. That was when the fire was attacking Clinton aggressively again. I had my house sprinklered a week and a half before anyone else up here. It was another crew that eventually did the rest of Green Lake.”
Brad spent his days moving sprinklers. Eventually, the brown grass on his property turned green. Every six days or so, the wind would pick up, and with 30–50 kph gusts behind it, the fire would just take off. One such occasion was Friday, August 11. In his work log on August 10, Glen Burgess, the incident commander for the Elephant Hill fire, wrote, “Discussed the Wx change the next few days and potential spread to N, NE, E.” (“Wx” is an old abbreviation for “weather,” dating back to the time of telegraphs.) His August 11 entry at 14:10 reads: “Div. B, fire activity increased pulling crews to safety—fire moving northerly—East Branch, fire activity picking up.”68 That day, a printed Fire Behaviour Forecast from the BC Wildfire Service predicted winds of 30 kph in the region by late afternoon and warned about an intermittent crown fire with flame lengths of over nine metres.69
“It was just a wall of inferno five miles long,” Brad said, “basically ran along the south side of Green Lake, a couple of kilometres away. That was the worst night. You don’t know how far away that fire is. I’m surrounded by trees. I used to go out at dusk on my ATV. I’d go out to a gravel pit down the way and get on a high hill so I could at least see a distance and figure out where things were. So I was awake all night and the pumps stayed on all night. I went through $500 worth of gas just to keep the pumps going. That night was just incredible. All the smoke that’s being produced by this fire ends up looking like fire too, because of the reflection of the fire in the smoke. You could see the trees candling and the flames going way up into the air. Gusting winds, it’s an inferno. Pretty scary.”
On August 12, Glen wrote in his first log entry of the day, “concern with people not leaving, taking advice from so-called ‘experts,’ not us.”70 That situation, and the disaster that had just occurred hours before at Pressy Lake, may explain why, at 11:00 in the morning, Brad saw two pickups, carrying two conservation officers and one RCMP officer, pull into his place. “About ten people on Green Lake had stayed and the conservation officers and the RCMP officer had the job of convincing them to get out. Brad said, “These are three grown men who were scared shitless. You should have seen them. It scared me, they were so afraid. They said, ‘Get the hell out of here. The fire has jumped all the guards that they have been building for the last two weeks. It’s coming here, get out of here.’ I said, ‘No. I made my decision. I’m here.’”
But when the conservation officers and the policeman left, Brad didn’t feel so good. “I sat down for half an hour. It was the only time I was scared.” What am I doing? he asked himself. “When a fire comes at you like that, you can’t fight it. But I did have a Plan B: I had a bottle of whiskey in my boat. I could wrap a wet towel around my head, go out in the lake and watch what the hell’s going on. I went, ‘No. I made my decision. I’ve been here for a friggin’ month and I’m staying and getting back to work.’” If Brad had known about what had happened at Pressy Lake, the advice from the RCMP and conservation officers might have given him pause. However, the story about the arrival of an explosive rank 6 fire, which drove the firefighters away and burned so many homes and cabins at Pressy Lake, would not be confirmed publicly for another week.
After his visitors left, Brad did more clearing and watering. That evening, he put on his full retardant fire suit and pressurized mask and got on his ATV. He drove down Hutchison Road, where a big long finger of the fire was pointing straight toward him. “I just had to know what was happening,” Brad explained. “Nobody was telling anybody anything and I couldn’t see.” It was getting dark, about 9:00 p.m., and as he drove south and approached the epicentre of the fire, more and more smoke enveloped the road. On either side, he could see flames here and there, stumps and snags ablaze. He got as far as Hutchison Lake, about eight kilometres to the southeast. “It got so smoky,” Brad said, “I couldn’t even breathe with my respirator on.” Still, he concluded that the intensity of the fire was ebbing. “It was smouldering all over the place and if a wind came up, it would be there again.” But for the moment, he felt the beast was slumbering and he could go back and get some sleep. He said, “I’m sixty-four now. I couldn’t stay awake two nights in a row like I used to.” Gail, at Horse Lake, stayed up all night, glued to Facebook so she could see if something came up. If it did, she would phone Brad and alert him.
On August 13, the BC Wildfire Service predicted cooler temperatures and even a few scattered showers. Brad settled back into his routine. In the morning, he told me, he’d see a little smoke, which by 11:00 would turn into a plume. “By 12:00, it looked like Hiroshima just south of us and then at 4:00, the water bombers would come in. You had two sets. You had the Quebec bombers, the big yellow ones. They fly in fours.” Known as CL-415s or Superscoopers, the planes were specifically designed for aerial firefighting and perform well in the gusty conditions often found around forest fires. They can heft six thousand litres of water per drop.71 “Then you had the Fire Boss planes, flying in sixes,” Brad said. They are smaller, capable of dropping three thousand litres of retardant or water. They can fill a tank in fifteen seconds from over seventeen hundred bodies of water in BC.72 “They would all use my house as the staging area,” Brad said. “Every afternoon for a couple of weeks, as soon as they arrived, these planes circled my house four or five times just to get lined up properly. They’re looking at the air currents and the waves and to get their orders about where they’re bombing. And of course, I’m out there waving at them and they’re dipping their wings at me. I swear they were trying to touch my house sometimes, they were getting so close. They’d go off and knock down this fire and the smoke would go away and the next day at 11:00 there’s smoke again and by 12:00 it’s a raging inferno and the fire bombers would come back and do it again.”
It is remarkable how much water these planes can dispense. The Superscoopers can drop fifty-four thousand litres per hour when the water source is eleven kilometres away. In that time the Fire Bosses can dispense fifty-three thousand litres. If the full fleets of four and six planes are running for eight hours a day, that adds up to over 4 million litres of water. About the same volume of water goes over the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara in two seconds.73
While the fixed-wing aircraft were dropping their loads of water, sixteen Bell 212 helicopters were launching from the Flying U Ranch on the north side of Green Lake, fourteen kilometres away from Brad’s place. “They’re fifteen-passenger helicopters,” Brad said. “They’re all over the place. You also had the Sikorsky Skycranes—two of them. They were trying to fight the fire behind the main fire line, to put out all the hot spots. They’d hover over a pond, suck up all the water and frogs and drop it on a snag here and there. You’ve got sixteen helicopters going all the time, bombers flying around, bird dog planes.” As I mentioned in chapter 11, bird dog planes provide a mobile, in-air traffic-control service.
“And then,” Brad said, “you have the retardant bombers.” One day, Gail, who was constantly scouring the internet for information, got a Facebook message from a friend, who was at the airport in Kamloops sitting next to a senior forestry official. She somehow discovered that bombers were coming to drop retardant on the Potters’ house. Gail phoned Brad to let him know and sure enough, a few minutes later, four planes showed up: two propeller-driven and two jets. I thought this was an interesting use of social media, illustrating the speed at which it can disseminate news. And though Facebook is often rightly criticized for permitting the spread of inaccurate stories, there is nothing inherently inaccurate about it. Here you see how ordinary people can use it to access intelligence that previously was unavailable to them.
Brad recalled the planes’ arrival vividly: “They’re circling my house but way up high. My wife is phoning me: ‘Get inside, you can’t be outside.’” Gail was worried about the toxic effects, but Brad wanted to see what the planes were up to and he figured he could manage the risk. “I went outside. My wharf is a hundred feet long, so I went out to the end, parked my butt on the end of the wharf, got a case of beer and got all my cameras. I sat in the boat for forty minutes while these big friggin’ vultures surrounded me. They kept circling me. It was kind of freaky. My property is on a peninsula. What they did was to pick the narrowest part on the peninsula. They finally came in and dropped three loads of retardant. They’ve got the bird dog plane and four friggin’ bombers. And I’m going, ‘I’ve got my tax dollars back for the last ten years.’ You just think of it. It’s a lot of money. I find out after the fact that every time they drop a load of retardant, it’s $10,000. That was $30,000 they put across the narrow spot on the peninsula. It was crazy. Quite an airshow all summer long.”
At the beginning of September, Brad managed to sneak his wife home. Then on Tuesday, September 12, Brad’s birthday, the official word came. He got the present of his life when he found out that, at 3:00 in the afternoon, the all-clear would sound. After six weeks of lockdown, the RCMP opened the checkpoints to let everyone back to South Green. “We made a big sign,” Brad said. “My wife uses a golf cart to get around the property. We’d funkied it up because the name of the resort is ‘The Wind and The Pillows.’” The Potters had altered the cart to make it worthy of Mr. Toad, a character in The Wind in the Willows, giving it big bug-eyed headlights, a roof with LED lights going around it, and a stereo system. When the Green Lake residents came in, it was a regular parade, a police car leading the way, driving very slowly, people honking their horns. The Potters went up to the road in their golf cart, cranked up the salsa music and waved as their friends and neighbours arrived. On the weekend, they had a big pig roast and potluck dinner. Bands played and 175 people came. “It was a hoot,” Brad remembered. “And that was the end of it all, I suppose, although things were still burning up in the hills.”
The Potters’ house survived, but they didn’t get off scot-free. Brad owns sixty-five hectares down on Hutchison Road that was totally wiped out by the fire—a quarter section sitting at the end of a lake, surrounded by Crown land. Brad told me the original Begbie Trail, built in 1843, went through it. I couldn’t find a reference to a “Begbie Trail” of that date. In fact, I read that Mathew Begbie only arrived in the colony of British Columbia in 1858 to take a position as the first chief justice. But Brad got the date right. I did find that a Hudson’s Bay Company trader called Alexander Anderson used a trail between Green Lake and Horse Lake from 1843 to 1848.74 This trail predates the Cariboo Wagon Road, which was built in 1862, and followed the route of the original Hudson’s Bay Brigade Trails. Brad said that the remains of a way station—two log cabins and a log barn—were still on his property. They date back to the Cariboo Wagon Road days, when there were stopping points every ten or eleven kilometers so the coaches could change horses. “All that’s gone,” Brad said. “The fire was so intense that even the topsoil burnt.”
Brad’s struggle with the fire was basically a success story. However, even he had losses. We all did, really, when a small part of British Columbia’s history went up in smoke.