Chapter 23 It come in here with a vengeance
By August 17, the Elephant Hill fire had grown to 168,000 hectares.75 Its progress north was relentless. Gordon and I were staying at our cabin on Sheridan Lake and the perimeter fire map showed a finger pointing northeast directly at us. The tip of that finger was only ten kilometres away. I wrote in my diary:
Still very worried. Supposed to be big winds tomorrow. Mark texted Gordon they would be 80 kmh. I don’t see that on the internet weather channels—Weather Network and AccuWeather. I have moments of fear—moments of okay. The fear is often prompted by others: Mark and his 80 kmh winds; Ann, who said there would be a storm this aft (there wasn’t); also Larry’s description of fires didn’t help, flames shooting three hundred feet up, generating winds that send embers tumbling onto houses—scary!
We undertook preparations. I always felt better when I was doing something rather than simply waiting like a sitting duck. My diary noted, “We bought a fire hose and Gordon had fun wetting down the cabin and environs.”
August 18. The skies were clear and the winds from the northwest. “Today we’ll be painting the house with fire retardant,” I wrote. “Still loads of downed trees to deal with. What are we going to do with them all?”
August 19. The perimeter map had not changed. A finger was still pointing straight at us and was still ten kilometres away.
Predicted storm came around 4 pm, big gusts but all from the NW, so good for us. A little rain, maybe 5 mm. I feel much better. Maybe unreasonably so? Fire Info Officer said that we are entering into a warmer drier period. He emphasized that the fire season is not over. Half the Cariboo is still either on alert or on order.
I was very happy to see Pat and Talia when they arrived to spend the weekend with us; they offered to help fire-smart the place.
August 20.
Calm and cool. Normally I wouldn’t like to see the cool weather—fall coming on. But now I welcome it. The report on the Elephant Hill fire said there was activity on the northern and eastern flanks, but the fire didn’t grow beyond its perimeter. There was some rain on the fire. Here we had about 1/2 inch. Feel much better than on Thursday when the smoke was heavy on the hills.
August 21.
Eclipse. Sky got somewhat dimmer. Forgot to look at the sun. Felt a bit sad. Talia and Pat left. They were very helpful! We got the water tower painted with Lumber Guard and more wood split. But so much blowdown in June. Impenetrable tangles of downed trees—some quite massive. That’s the real issue here. Climate change affects us in many ways—the pine beetle, blowdown and then hotter drier summers—a perfect storm. The worst fire season in the province’s history.
August 22. The lake was quiet, unnervingly so. Hardly anyone was around. We went canoeing, saw maybe two cabins occupied to the east of us, but none to the west. I wrote:
Gordon hosed down the place. How much good does that do? I still think we are too woodsy. How can we not be woodsy? I saw a toad yesterday. I liked seeing it. Fat with yellow markings. I often feel overwhelmed. And then I cook or burn brush in the fireplace. Feel a bit better.
Gordon, true to form, is remarkably sanguine, cheerful. “You think,” he says, “we’re on the brink, on a precipice. But we’re not. You think we’re on the edge.”
“Yes,” I say, “that’s how I feel.”
Got smoky after lunch. Ash rained down on us. But we saw a few stars tonight. Maybe clearer. And I wished on one. “No fire.” As if that does any good! The loons still call and we heard the sandhill cranes also.
After this, my diary goes silent. On August 23, our elderly friend Jane arrived for another visit, along with her younger sister, Nancy Platt. Jane stayed with us, and Nancy at her own place farther west along the lake. Jane was keen to come, but I wasn’t sure it was a good idea. I always had in mind that we might have to flee at a moment’s notice, and Jane wasn’t exactly nimble. My son, Tom, and his wife, Leanna, also came for a short visit. While they were at the cabin, the smoke lifted and we had benign puffy white clouds instead. We swam and canoed, just like we used to. An update on August 25 showed that the fire had grown again—to 175,000 hectares.76 The finger was still directed at us, but not significantly closer. Next day, the kids left and I wondered morosely whether we would ever be together at the cabin again.
The smoke was a putrid yellowish-grey when we woke on August 30. We couldn’t see any distance down the lake, neither to the east nor the west. An acrid smell stung my nose. This can’t be good, I thought to myself. I had a deep sense of foreboding. But I’d had that feeling before and nothing terrible had happened. It wasn’t a reliable indicator.
Gordon and I had planned to drive to 100 Mile that morning to do some shopping. However, I worried about leaving Jane by herself in our boat-access-only cabin. While we had breakfast, I suggested, “Jane, how about we take you down to Nancy’s while we’re at the 100?” She flatly refused. I pointed out, “We’ll have the speedboat. What will you do if an evacuation order comes?” She said, “I’ll row out.” The idea struck me as crazy. She was ninety-one and partially blind. “I’m not afraid.” Jane said. “If I were afraid, I wouldn’t be here.” She was feisty, but that didn’t mean she was right.
At that point, Gordon announced that he wanted to clear away some more brush and wet the place down before we left. My discussion with Jane was postponed. At 11:13 a.m., our friend Ann texted Gordon: “I think you should get ready because they are talking about evacuation south of the highway. I think it’s happening sometime today.” Ann’s partner, Larry, works for Conair, a company that has a contract with the BC Wildfire Service to supply aerial firefighting. Her sources are good. Shortly after, Nancy phoned to say that she’d heard from Chris Brown at the Paradise Bay Resort at the western end of Sheridan Lake. He said the district was going to come to a decision very shortly. We rushed around putting away things that were strewn about the deck and dragging propane tanks down to the lakeshore.
“Should I strip my bed?” Jane asked. “Don’t bother,” I said. “If the place burns down, it won’t matter. And if it doesn’t, we’ll be back.” She laughed and went back to tidying up.
And then at 12:54 p.m., Gordon and I both got texts, phone messages and emails from the Cariboo Emergency Notification System, all saying the same thing: “Evacuation Order issued for an area south of Highway 24, including the areas of Watch Lake, Little Horse Lake, Little Green Lake and the western side of Sheridan Lake.” We had registered on the system because without road access we assumed it was best not to count on the RCMP knocking on our door.
At least now, I thought, I won’t have to argue with Jane about her idea of rowing out. We threw our clothes together. Gordon attached the fire hose to the pump and lashed it to our solar panels. Then he started the pump and directed the spray over the roof. The pump would run until the tank ran out of gas. It wasn’t much protection, but it was some. I took a picture of Gordon on the roof setting up our “sprinkler system,” sent it to our family, and labelled it “Gordon’s Last Defence.” Then we got in our boat and headed for the resort, where our car was parked. We met Nancy there; she was going to drive Jane home in her car.
Gordon and I had arranged to take our boat into 100 Mile for winter storage after Labour Day. We talked about whether we should haul it in a few days early or whether, to save time, we should just leave the boat tied up at the dock. “If we aren’t running for our lives, we might as well take the boat to 100 Mile,” I said. Gordon and I looked at each other. Were we running for our lives? We didn’t know. We understood that if an evacuation order was issued, we were supposed to go—immediately. But how fast is that? Having crossed the lake, I felt a little safer. We decided we could chance it, and took the extra time needed to load the boat. I remember at one point peering past the resort dock into the sepia murk and seeing a water skier, of all things. Here we were wondering if we were running for our lives and someone else was water skiing! Talk about cognitive dissonance! But of course, only the south side of the lake was evacuated. The north side was still just on alert.
We had some trouble undoing a bolt on the trailer; I went to see if I could borrow a wrench from Chris. He found one in his shop. “Just leave it by the door when you go,” he said.
“You’re staying?” I asked.
“You betcha.”
I wasn’t surprised. I hugged him. “Be safe.” I said.
Chris had sold the resort in the spring but the new owners had been in no hurry to move in; they agreed to take possession in September and Chris stayed on during the summer. Brad Potter, who was the realtor on the deal, told me, “At the beginning of that fire, my buyer was phoning me and going, ‘Brad, what’s my situation if that fire gets as far as Sheridan Lake and burns down the resort? Do I still have to buy it?’”
Brad recalled saying, “Don’t be stupid, that fire is so far away it will never ever get that far.” Every week the buyer would phone and ask the same question, as the fire got closer and closer. And Brad kept saying the same thing. “No one ever imagined the fire would go over a hundred kilometres,” he said. “One wind event took the fire from Watch Lake all the way up to Jack Frost Lake.” As the crow flies, these two lakes are about six and a half kilometres apart. “The next day the winds came from the west and pushed the fire toward Sheridan Lake.”
Chris was in a financial bind. If the property went up, the purchase agreement was toast too. Despite the evacuation order, he was determined to remain behind. He managed to persuade his wife to leave, but he was going to stay as long as he could, to protect the resort and his sale.
Chris had been hosing his place down for some time before the evacuation order was issued. When he first started, the pump he was using didn’t have much pressure. The spray wouldn’t go very far or very high. He figured he wasn’t going to be able to fight the fire successfully with it. But as so often happened, there was a serendipitous intervention. Chris told me later, “The guy from the Honda shop pulls up in my yard with a brand new pump and suction hose. ‘That’s from Dave,’ he says.” Dave is another resident on the south shore of the lake, who also stayed during the fires. He has a big off-grid house with a large shop and numerous outbuildings. His nickname is Airplane Dave because he often comes and goes in his float plane.
I might have a chance now, Chris thought. He felt so encouraged that he bought a second new pump and set of hoses. He had both pumps running, hooking one up to his network of sprinklers and the other to the fire hose that he used to manually wet everything down. “I was soaking every tree as high as I could spray it. I’d work my way up and down, follow the branches, go to the next tree, the next tree, the next tree. I did that for a week on all these trees around the house as far as I could reach and as far back as I could go. I was even spraying down my wood piles, fire hose wide open on them. I thought, If they catch on fire, I’ll never get them out. Keep ’em soaked. I bought sprinklers too. I had one in the backyard that sprayed all around and halfway up the trees. It would actually spray almost to the house. Another one I put on the trail here—it was spraying around in circles and on the house. One was going back and forth. The other was going ’round and ’round. Tens of thousands of gallons of water I sprayed around.” Chris was using so much water that a low spot toward the back of his property turned into a small lake. But the inferno behind was snorting on regardless, engulfing the forest, spewing roiling ashy clouds high into the sky, and glowering with intensity.
Structural protection crews came on August 31. Chris had sprinklers on his house, but the crews gave him some more to put on the shop. The four redoubtable bombers from Quebec—241, 242, 243 and 246—arrived and Trevor Pugh, a local cottager, posted an impressive video on Facebook showing how they were hammering away at the fire: scoop, head for the target, drop and repeat, a five-minute cycle.77 At this point, the fire was about two kilometres away from the resort (five kilometres from our place).78 Even now as I revisit the video, watch the yellow planes, hear their engines drone and the loud swish as they swoop into the blue waters of Sheridan Lake for their load, I feel like punching the air with my fist and yelling yes! It’s like looking at an old war movie: the fight is over, but you still want to root for your side.
The coordination of the attacking planes was lovely to behold, the responsibility of a BC Wildfire Service air attack officer who selected the targets and a bird dog pilot who together planned the run, led the bombers to meet the strike’s objectives and made sure they were able to do so safely. Ryan Gahan is a pilot with Conair who spent thirty hours flying over the fires between Green and Sheridan Lakes in the summer of 2017. When I spoke to him in a coffee shop in February 2019, he said, “I’m the bird dog for the Conair Fire Boss group, but I work with everybody—Conair, Air Spray [from Alberta], the Quebec guys.” He was an air traffic controller except that he didn’t do the job sitting at a desk, but while flying himself. “The challenging part is having good situational awareness, knowing where all the aircraft are,” he said. “Last summer I was on a fire at the Arrow Lakes just up from Castlegar. There’s helicopters going up and down a ravine. I was working in the middle with skimmers and the retardant ships were coming overtop. We had ten aircraft on us. So it turned into this big, big dance.”
To keep track of everybody, a bird dog plane has multiple radios; one is for communicating with the planes, another for talking to the ground crews, still another for connecting with the helicopters. When Ryan and an air attack officer work on a fire as big as the Elephant Hill fire, they may monitor two more radio frequencies, which provide a way of communicating across the whole incident. On top of all that, a traffic collision avoidance system displays radar on a screen. “It helps, but because there’s a delay to it, it’s not very accurate about where the planes actually are. But it gives you the number of aircraft that are out there.” A big, big dance indeed.
On September 1, the structural crews came again and set up sprinklers on Chris’s cabins. “For a couple of days,” Chris said, “we knew the fire was coming. No doubt about it. You could hear it roaring over there. I slept in the boat. The first night it was actually pretty quiet, except for the roar of the fire. The second night was terrible. By then they had pumps all over the lake. They are noisy two-strokers and they run wide-open, very little mufflers on them. Then I heard someone off-load a Cat. And they’re running around with that. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Clank, clank, clank. Pumps were roaring. It was cold. The second night I didn’t get much sleep.”
Despite the efforts of the hard-working pilots, the fire came through about 4:00 in the afternoon on September 2. “I just watched trees burst into flames. There was absolutely no doubt it was coming,” Chris said. “You could see the flames—hundred-foot flames coming off the trees. By the time it jumped the little channel, the little inlet or whatever, all these guys said, ‘We’re bucking out of here. We’re gone.’ Animals couldn’t outrun it, it was coming through that bush so fast. Maybe running straight down a road they could, but jumping over logs, they couldn’t. The wind was doing 40 K. The fire was leaping, blowing. It come in here with a vengeance.”
Carson Dorward was in charge of one of the structural protection crews working at Sheridan. He used to work full-time for the BC Wildfire Service and at one time owned a ranch at the southeast corner of Sheridan Lake, so he was familiar with the area. When I talked to him on the phone, he said, “If a fire is really rolling, standing in front of it is not going to do any good. When you’ve got a fire going through the treetops, you can put a bunch of water down in front of it. It may skip a little bit but the heat that it’s putting out will evaporate the water. The sparks will jump over what you’ve done. You can go along the sides of it and prevent it from widening out. As far as stopping the head of a fire that’s actually rolling, Mother Nature’s the only one that’s got the secret to doing that.”
One small dirt road led out of the resort to Magnussen Road and then to Highway 24. If fire engulfed that narrow track, anyone on the resort property would be trapped. Carson didn’t want to take that chance: “Leaving people in a situation where they are going to be surrounded by fire is not something we can justify doing. We made the decision to make a tactical withdrawal and to continue working in the rest of the subdivision until we could be sure it was safe. You can never eliminate the risk. But you can mitigate it.”
All the ground crews were pulled off the fire. The air crews left as well because it had become too smoky for them to operate. However, Carson made Chris a handsome offer. He was willing to stay behind: “If you want, I’ll come out in the boat with you. When this thing blows over, we’ll come back and put out spot fires.” They jumped into Chris’s boat moored at the dock, went out into the lake and anchored offshore where they could watch the unholy spectacle unfolding on land. Chris told me, “It came behind the resort here. The speed that fire was coming through, I didn’t think we’d be there long. We sat out there, and the lake was really rough—noisy and rough. It was crazy. Smoke just rolled through. This whole place disappeared.”
Meanwhile, Gordon and I were at home in North Vancouver, wondering what was happening at the lake. We consulted the official sources: the Emergency Operations Centres and the Fire Centres. But sometimes we wanted more information than they provided. My daughter put me onto a YouTube channel called brents desk.79 Brent posted regular updates three or four times a day, sometimes more often than that. On his channel, he had links to BC, Canadian and US sources—over twenty sites that provided fire map data, wind and weather data, webcam images and, most engrossing of all, hot spot data. Satellite sensors seven hundred kilometres up in space can detect a backyard fire that is only 3 × 3 metres.80 They are sensitive to objects hotter than about 200°C and since wildfires may reach temperatures of between 800°C and 1,200°C,81 they are eminently detectable. If smoke or clouds obscure the view, however, maps of hot spots might under-report the real activity.
Brent walked viewers through the information, explained what was of interest, and cautioned about inaccuracies. He reminded his audience that hot spot data could be off by half a kilometre or more. He advised those needing to make a decision to use more than one source and to always pay attention to boots-on-the-ground reports, if available. I liked his careful approach and the way he provided both data and education so members of the public could better understand things for themselves.
Though Brent used a YouTube channel, we only heard him and never saw his face, only the maps and images he was talking about. He never mentioned his last name. He was like a mysterious war correspondent. I grew to depend on him and I would instantly recognize his opening “Greetings” anywhere. Brent became our lifeline. I checked his channel first thing in the morning and at night before I went to bed.
Other people felt the same way about brents desk. Cathy Smith, whose cabin at Pressy Lake luckily did not burn, told me: “Everybody was glued to brents desk. Anytime I got a new post from him, I shared it on our Pressy Lake page. A little while ago they were asking people to put people’s names forward for unsung heroes. I tried to put him forward for recognition, but he’s like that Carlton the doorman [heard via the intercom but almost never seen in the seventies sitcom Rhoda], a mystery guy, and I didn’t have his email, his address or his name even.” Alicia Polanski, whose story I told in chapter 20, was also a cottager at Pressy Lake. “I love Brent,” she said. “I don’t know who in hell he is. I think his name might be Kyle. In all honesty, he’s the person who kept a lot of us sane. Everything was facts. You could not get facts from anybody. Everybody gave you the runaround.”
Later, I confirmed that Brent was not Kyle, but really Brent Lewis. He had a farm in Port Coquitlam and a place in Chasm that he described in an email as “one of our most special places to be.” The information available from official sources was not detailed enough for him, he said. “I was beginning to understand the fire was dynamic and changed positions without notice. I needed to see, hourly or better, real-time information on where the fire was.” A search led him to the National Research Council Interactive Infrared Map, which told him where the new fires were breaking out. He did a lot of reading online to understand what he was looking at; he began to grasp the importance of wind direction and discovered a website called Windy.com. “When I found the information on wildfire infrared and wind helpful, it just felt like the neighbourly thing to do was share it.” From July 20 to September 28, he posted 150 videos.
In my living room in North Vancouver, looking for news on the fire, I turned to Brent’s most recent post. “Greetings, it is September 2 at 5:00 p.m. Let’s go to Windy right now and see the pattern that’s occurring.” He directed the viewers’ attention to a spot just above the fire line where winds from the north were meeting winds from the south. “Essentially,” he said, “it’s the wind rotating around and it may actually blow the fire back in on itself and that would be ideal. Let’s take a look at the infrared now. This is the VIIRS system and we’re showing data from 4:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time and as you can see a few concentrations of new infrared on the fringe area … ”
Two hours later: “Greetings, this is September 2 at 7:00 p.m. and this is the issue of the day: that smoke is obscuring much of the visibility and it could be obscuring infrared data. As you see on this screen, we see a few random dots by the Modis system but if we look at the photographic material provided by the Beddow Tree webcam looking west at Sheridan, we see smoke in the distance. So we’re left with two big questions: how recent is the data and how accurate is the data?”
And then four hours later: “Greetings, this is September 2 at 11:00 p.m. If you look to right of centre of your screen you’ll see Sheridan Lake, and southwest of that is Number Two Lake, and we can see infrared being displayed on the southern shore of that lake. I’ve heard unverified reports that activity was occurring today within the last twelve hours near to Paradise Bay at the southwestern end of Sheridan Lake … ”
Those reports may have been “unverified,” but they were true nonetheless. “The smoke was coming closer and closer to us,” Chris told me, as he continued to describe what he and Carson were seeing as they were moored offshore. “I didn’t know how hot it was, but it was solid black. It wouldn’t have been good to be in that. I was just thinking maybe I’d better move back. I was about to start up the boat and turn around when all of a sudden you see that cloud of smoke clear away. The fire quit moving to the east. It just petered out and started going to the south.”
Carson said, “I remember looking at it first and going, ‘The wind’s shifted, but it will come right back again.’ Then I was like, ‘The wind’s shifting. It’s shifting!’ A set of goosebumps comes. ‘It’s actually pushing it away. The smoke is starting to clear.’ Now you know it’s not just a gust in the other direction, but a shift. It was pretty cool.”
Don Schwartz, another Sheridan Lake cottager, had captured some of these moments in a short video he posted on Facebook. You can’t see the resort—it is enveloped in a thick blanket of smoke that reaches to the water’s edge—but the fire is clearly moving at a good clip.82
When the smoke lifted, Chris and Carson came back to land and started looking over the property. “I figured there’d be nothing left,” Chris said. “I still thought probably everything was on fire. I wasn’t relieved yet. I was still pretty shook up. I landed on the little dock straight out front. I come ’round, I could see the house was standing. I was still in disbelief that nothing was on fire. After we walked through the backyard, I went, ‘I just can’t believe it; not even that little shack was burnt.’” A couple of old rotten stumps were smouldering, but Chris’s house, the shop, the six cabins and the boathouse had all survived. The fire had come right to the edge of his property line but had not crossed it.
As soon as Mother Nature had done her bit, the firefighters mobilized to take advantage. The crews took a boat to our friend Ann’s cabin. Her cottage was the closest to the resort at the southwest corner of the lake and the fire came to within fifty metres of it. The structural protection crews put sprinklers on her roof and on Nancy’s, which was next door.
“Even after it went south,” Chris said, “it was still behind all the houses. I spent four days with the firefighters, ferrying them, sprinklers, hoses and pumps to all the cabins.” All along the south shore, every building and shop was outfitted with sprinklers. Chris said, “They did not miss much. Guys would work until dark. I’d go pick ’em up. They’d be over there flashing their lights so I could find them. We ended up changing out a pump at 10:00 at night. I went to pick those guys up and they couldn’t get the pump started. It was the closest place to the fire line. They tried and tried. I said, ‘Okay, let’s go and get another pump.’ We set up a new pump, started her up.” The pumps were hooked up to double tanks so they could burn about thirty-eight litres of gas and run for nearly twenty-four hours without being refilled. They were linked to hose networks, so each pump generally served three properties. Chris said the crews were bringing in nearly 570 litres of gas a day, enough to provide structural protection for around forty-five places.
I had the impression that the BC Wildfire Service was determined to slay the dragon once and for all and pulling out all the stops. The air support continued, now from BC’s Conair fleet and helicopters—Bell 214s, Bell 205s, A-Stars—bucketing up to thirty-eight hundred litres of water. Chris thought probably a half dozen to a dozen heavy equipment operators were working on a fireguard in the back. They wanted to give the cabins on the south side some protection in case the wind shifted again and blew from the south.
The first indication I had about the probable fate of our cabin was a post on the Sheridan Lake Facebook site. On September 3 at 10:10 a.m., Ann’s sister Martha wrote:
I spoke with Cindy this morning. They went out in the boat and checked all our cabins and everything is still okay. She will give a full update when she gets home tonight.
The Elephant Hill fire had grown to 192,000 hectares.83 The bloated monster died just one kilometre away from our beloved place. Like Chris, having expected disaster for so long, I felt strange when the danger passed.