A fire ban has been issued in the MD of Foothills after 45 fire fighters from five separate departments spent hours battling a March 31 grass fire near Blackie that stretched more than a kilometre.
A fire ban has been issued in the MD of Foothills after 45 fire fighters from five separate departments spent hours battling a March 31 grass fire near Blackie that stretched more than a kilometre.
“Right now the fire ban means there's no open burning whatsoever in the MD of Foothills including any burn barrels or warming fires,” said Foothills Fire chief Jim Smith. “All those need to be extinguished if they are burning until conditions improve.”
Smith said the dry, windy conditions already had his crews on high alert when the call for response near Blackie came into the Foothills Fire Department at 3:25p.m. on March 31. He said it was started accidentally by a resident who had used a lawn tractor on the dry grass.
"It was accidental, wrong place, wrong time, wrong conditions," he said.
Wind gusts of nearly 60km per hour fueled the quick spread of the fire, prompting the MD to declare a local state of emergency at 5:45 p.m. in an effort to prepare Blackie residents for possible evacuation and to warn people to steer clear of the area. Smith said the speed the fire was moving at prompted them to change their strategy in an effort to protect four houses at risk.
“Normally we do have a pincer movement, we had to change tactics and actually go ahead of the fire and make sure the houses and people in those houses were safe,” he said.
Crews were able to contain and control the fire by 9 p.m. but were onsite until 1:30 a.m. extinguishing hot spots. Unfortunately, the wind picked back up later that morning and crews spent most of April 1 back at the scene fighting new flare-ups.
In addition to assistance from other departments, Smith said the local farmers played a huge role in battling the fire.
“The farmers they played a huge role and really without them we couldn't have done what we,” Smith said. “The biggest thing they did was till up the field so basically getting rid of the fuel that the fire can burn. So they help protect us, they help protect the homes, they also help protect the infrastructure around the places that were burning and they did a marvelous job.”
MD of Foothills reeve Larry Spilak said he was impressed with the way the fire departments and farmers were able to handle the situation, and said he couldn't recall any other time where a fire had prompted a state of emergency.
“The reason why this one was so important was because we needed very fire station in the region to attack this fire, it was huge,” he said. “It was to a point where our emergency group were contemplating calling in the fire bombers because it was moving that quickly towards the houses and other properties.”
Spilak said they made the decision to issue the state of emergency because all of the region's fire-fighting resources were tied up and left most of the MD unprotected.
“One of the reasons for that was that we had every fire department in the region on one location,” Spilak said. “If something else would have happened in a different location we would have had a problem.”
Despite that, Spilak said they made a decision not to issue an alert through the MD Emergency Alert System as it would have alerted the entire foothills region, whereas only six houses in a very specified region needed to be notified.
“Part of me says everybody has a right to know what is going on in the MD so we should be utilizing it,” he said. “On the other hand what our emergency people stated in saying that could create some panicking and some responses that weren't necessary makes sense too.”
Spilak said in the future, they're hoping to be able to send alerts to individual areas of the MD.
“The plan has always been to specify what area and be able to send it to certain areas,” he said. “We just haven't been able to get our technology there yet, but that will be coming.”
