Wind, wildfire and evacuation in Alberta

This is a little too close to home.

We've have unusually strong, steady winds combined with very dry surface conditions over the last week.

The same winds, gusting up to 100 kph, pushed a wildfire into the town of Slave Lake, a small community of about 7,000, about 3 hours' drive north of me. A hasty mandatory evacuation ensued and about a third of the town burned to the ground.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Thousands+flee+Slave+Lake/4790689/story.html

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nati...#articlecontent

On a personal note, the same winds totally trashed my antique windmill, which has been standing since the 1930s. I need to figure out how to put a line on the thing, which is now a widowmaker, three stories up and hanging by a thread.

But first, I'm going out to re-mow and widen a few firebreaks in case some idiot tosses a cigarette butt into the ditch.

Hang in there! I hope the situation resolves in your favor. Fires seem to be the one disaster we all must face, whether we live in earthquake country or in tornado/hurricane areas.

Spent the last hour widening my firebreaks, and knocking down any tall, dry grass that could lead a fire into my yard. Fortunately the grass is greening up in the ditches, so the odds of a fast-moving fire are greatly diminished.

My to-do list is mostly cleanup at this point. Nothing compared to the problems that folks north of me are having.

Fingers crossed here that nothing happens. Besides, you know the rule: if you prepare for it, it won't happen; if you think it won't happen, it will.

Good luck! Fingers, toes and eyes crossed for you.

Sue

Good luck Doug. Stay safe! I hear it's pretty nasty in some spots.

All my crossables are crossed for you.

Hope all is well Doug. A friend of mine from BC Forest Service Firefighters has been called up to fight the fire and is enroute.

Just watched Global National and I cannot believe how dry it is up there for this time of year. Most people do not realize how far north Slave Lake is from Edmonton which is what about 450 miles from the USA border? Must be another a few hundred more clicks to Slave...it should still be winter this time of year.

Keep safe, my friend.

Teslin, - Back from self imposed ETS exile.

I appreciate the kind thoughts, but to be clear I'm a long way from the danger zone. (As long as I don't get my head taken off by a thousand pounds of dangling cast iron windmill.)

My thoughts and hopes are with the people who have lost their homes and, to some degree, their community. And especially with the firefighters coming in from BC, Ontario, and elsewhere. We can use the help right now, and will reciprocate whenever we can. I believe there are also agreements where US and Canadian firefighters exchange resources as needed, though I don't think that is in play yet. Pray for rain. This news story has a NASA pic of the many fires in the area -- notice how the smoke plumes indicate an unvarying wind from the southeast. http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Hundreds+homes+just+smouldering+rubble/4793473/story.html

P.S., Welcome back, Teslin. We need some boots-on-the-ground opinions to balance my comfy LaZBoy musings. Hope you have more pics of those wild BC mountains for us.

I'm waiting to hear from my nephew. He left a cryptic message on FB about him being in h*ll, fire and brimstone, etal. He's a helitak fighter based in a couple hours away from Slave Lake and we've all been guessing that his crew was called in to be on the ground fighting this fire. He's probably out of cell phone range or else he's too busy to post from his smart phone. Either way the winds of the last couple of days (up to 100 kph) are making the firefighters job a big one. They've been calling in crews from other provinces to help as well. But nothing can be done about the fire that ravaged the town now. All that's left is to dowse the embers and prepare to rebuild.

Slave Lake residents wonder why call to evacuate never came:
http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/nation...?service=mobile

"...evacuees repeatedly question why there was no advance warning for a fire that razed about 300 homes and damaged another 300, according to town estimates. Scores of families are homeless and left without anything, saying they’d be much better off now if they had been given even an hour’s notice."

I hope he's ok, Roar!

That is a good argument for thinking for yourself. I don't understand why the people who think their government is run by idiots (everywhere) then just sit down and wait to be told to evacuate by the same halfwits. This isn't the first time this has happened, and it certainly won't be the last.

I guess humankind can be divided into three groups:

1) The ones who have the sense to think for themselves, and leave ahead of orders;
2) The ones who won't move until they're told to;
3) The ones who are told to leave, and won't.

Sue

There are many cases where my thoughts would echo Sue's. Certainly, people should make provisions for unexpected events. Many don't, which is frustrating; and these are the people who make the best human interest story for the media.

On the other hand, this particular event is a bit of an oddball. As I understand it, a fire that would normally be considered a safe distance from town, and was being actively suppressed, turned into a monster. Unusually strong and steady winds pushed it into the edge of town at highway speed. This seems like a firestorm phenomenon. The same winds and the waves they caused on the lake grounded the water bombers that had been fighting the fire.

There were a lot of people with their trailers packed and ready to go. But the fire moved so quickly that all the roads out were cut before officials and individuals could react. By the time people had any realistic indication that it was time to bug out, there was no way to get out.

I don't know if I would have fared all that much better given the circumstances.

That's the way it's happened in other places. They create their own wind, they can turn in a second on what appears to be a whim. They've made a beeline for the only buildings on a flat plain, why?

An acquaintance in SoCal was evacuating several haltered horses and the fire was coming after them. He turned his head to look back just in time to see the wind change and blow the flames 180 degrees right back into the burned area and it went out. He said afterward that he wasn't a religious man, but he got closer to being one that day than ever before.

Others aren't that lucky. How late is waiting too long?

Sue

How long is too long is an individual decision, but when you can't get your vehicle out of the driveway because fire trucks are bumper to bumper, responding to active flames that are about a quarter to one half mile from your residence, it might be time to pack up.

i have loaded up our van twice. We had a priority list which helped immensely. Interestingly enough, as far as I could tell, none of our immediate neighbors did anything at all in the way of making preparations to leave, or even wet down their property. But then it is also probable that none of them has any experience with wildfires. No official statement was ever issued for residents in our immediate area.

The suppression work was close enough that my wife received some over spray from a helicopter drop working about a quarter mile away.

That's the million dollar question. As an individual, you need information to make good decisions. In places and situations where there's a major storm and a lot of media coverage, you can get a sense of what's going on. That wasn't the case here.

Sometimes taking individual action without information is the wrong thing to do. If you look at the photo in this Globe & Mail article, you can see people bugging out into the fire, on a highway that had been technically closed but not yet barricaded.

The speed at which this fire went sideways (as little as an hour by some reports) seems to have caught the agency responsible flat-footed. Strong winds were in the forecast, but they came in considerably faster. Some people from the town say alerts/evacuation should have started the night before. They have a point. There was a major communication breakdown. The only bright spot is that no lives have been lost.

I would have said that was waiting too long .

Some people have trouble realizing that if the fire doesn't get to their place, they can go back. Simple, but hard for some people to wrap their heads around.

Sue

Here's another story from CBC with useful details.

Local residents learned more from each other using Twitter and Facebook than they did from the people in charge.

There's a lot to be learned from the "cascade failure" of essential services in a small centre with limited resources. This was coupled with a rather inexplicable communication failure from the provincial agency tasked with handling such events. It seems some essential lessons do not "take" unless learned the hard way.

Another way social media is transforming the world, and one I hadn't thought about. I'd always assumed social media wouldn't be much help in an emergency/disaster situation because power would be off, cell towers down, etc. Obviously not; since I'm in charge of the emergency preparedness group in our neighborhood, it might be time to take another look at using social media to spread the word since many are more "plugged in" there than anywhere else.

Many government agencies are turning to social media to "get the word out". The CDC launched a facebook page this week.


buckeye

When the radio station went off the air, people used texts and Facebook updates to find out about the evacuation order, closed highways, and other relevant information. Apparently cell service was spotty, but it lasted longer than any other information source. Similar to other events, you could get texts and some data through even if you couldn't make a voice call.

Looks like oil pipelines and production facilities are seeing some effects too. Part of that is damage to infrastructure like the electrical grid, and part of it is pulling operations crews out of uncertain areas and keeping oversize loads off the roads. Something like 100,000 bpd shut down now and perhaps 200,000 soon if the fire situation doesn't settle down. That doesn't include delays in drilling and oilsands construction. It's promising that the number of overall fires has dropped from 100 to 85 and the number of out-of-control fires has dropped from 36 to 21.

I have a cousin on the West Coast who had no idea about the Tsunami until she logged onto Facebook. Her area has a commuity Tsunami alert system but it turns out they weren't in any danger this time around. It definitely deserves a tip of the hat to social media though.

I don't know how I'd react in a similar wildfire situation but I'd like to think that we'd be out of there before the evac order or highway closure came if there was that level of risk. You just can't predict what Mother Nature is going to do. How do those of you in wildfire territory deal with it. If you can see it or smell it, is it too close for comfort?

What is really critical in wildfire behavior is weather, so pay attention to that. The drier, hotter, and windier the ambient conditions, the more unpredictable the fire will be. This is especially ture with respect to wind. An increase in velocity and/or direction will cause a fire to spread faster than you can outrun it. A stiff breeze will push burning embers ahead of the flame front and start satellite fires in advance.

Fire managers do pay particular attention to fire weather, especially local conditions. So should you.

A fire line is not necessarily a guarantee of safety, whether natural or man made. Fires have been known to jump four lane freeways. But sometimes you can feel secure. i was on West Anacapa island, looking up the Ventura River valley at a horrendous fire that was threatening Ojai, fifteen miles inland. Since Anaccapa is fourteen miles out in the santa Barbara Channel, I thought "That should keep us safe." Even so, we got considerable ash fall from the fire, fortunately nicely cooled. Even at that distance, the sight of exploding pine trees was quite impressive.

That would be pretty scarey Hikermor! I honestly don't know how y'all live in areas that are prone to natural disasters. The rest of us, who just venture out there on excursions, need to commit this stuff to heart too though. Thanks for the insight!

When it's windy enough, even a small fire can travel.

Several years ago, a man started his trash fire just west of Interstate 5 in Rochester, WA. The wind blew it over the solid fence and into the strip of grass between the fence and the freeway. In between cars, the fire jumped the southbound lanes to the center divider, then jumped the northbound lanes and headed east through the barbed wire.

I don't know if the homeowner it was aiming for saw it coming, or if people on the freeway reported it, but they got it stopped about twenty feet from the house.

Yes, the trash-burner was cited for an untended fire. GOOD!

Sue

Why do people insist on putting themselves in even when fire is raging around them and "things are exploding"?! Dumba$$! But there was just "...no water. No cable." His friend was even more Darwinian in my books - "He's got a family to support."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/yourcommunity/2011/05/citizen-bytes---rory-landry---slave-lake-student.html

A guy I used to work with nearly burned down his house when the embers flew over his house and ignited the leaves he hadn't raked yet. The fire got caught in the swirling air behind the house and burned against the overall wind direction and toward the house.

A neighbor spotted it an called the FD. The Fire Department rolls up and he complains that he is safely burning his leaves on his property and that he won't put up with any of their complaints. Meanwhile the fire is advancing on the house where he can't see it.

The fireman finally just guns the engine past him as he shakes his fist and cusses. Only when the engine pulls up on the other side of the house and the firemen start hosing the fire down does he realize that they aren't after his burn barrel.

The fire advanced to within a couple of feet of the house and slightly melted some of his vinyl siding.

Sometimes it isn't burning that gets you. A friend had some rural property with his house on it. A tree fell and took out the power line feeding his house. This started a fire and it burned down a couple score acres and a couple of unoccupied trailers. It took a fire engine and a crew of forest service firefighters, mostly using crawler and plow, half a day and part of the night to contain it.

Legally, because of his to failure to remove the tree that endangered the power line, he could have been charged with the cost of fighting the fire and sued by the other homeowners for damage to their trailers and property. He sweated for about a year before the states attorney finally announced the state wouldn't ask for payment. After a few more years his attorney finally announced the private landowners couldn't sue.

He wasn't a rich man and the bills could have been $100,000 or more. It would have sunk him.

Re: the Slave Lake student

A college education might educate you, but it sure can't fix stupid!

Maybe the apocalypse will just eliminate all the prospective Darwin Award nominees? Could we be so lucky?

Sue

It's fascinating to read these one-on-one interviews. It's a good insight into the way people think and behave in a crisis. It's like an altered state of consciousness.

The current tally for this fire is 450 homes and businesses burned to the ground. I don't know if that includes the municipal buildings and churches that also burned. More buildings were damaged, but I haven't seen numbers yet. Nature hit this town pretty hard.

A follow-up story on the original evacuation of Slave Lake. The residents have been allowed to return but now they and the town government have to deal with the disposal of up to 4000 fridges and freezers that need to be recycled due to rotting food in them.

I know from 1st hand experience the damage, rotting food in a non powered fridge for weeks can do. As much as you clean, the smell never leaves and as is the case at Slave Lake, the fridge will need to be disposed of...

Officials grappling with waste, sanitation in Slave Lake

Post-wildfire cleanup begins in Slave Lake

Glad these folks have finally been allowed to return home. But the aftermath of a disaster and evacuation is the opposite of sexy -- it's a giant, smelly PITA, accompanied by enough paperwork and red tape to choke a horse.

I think your making a mistake tossing the fridge/s. Hose it out, remove all the interior ducts, hose them out. Use bleach with a bit of detergent. Once cleaned and detailed storing the unit with the doors open for a few days worked wonders. If you can get it into the sunlight it helps.

If that doesn't do it. or you want to speed the process, use a mix of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and a small bit of dish soap. Wash, let dry ... wash, let dry.

We also had luck with oxygen based laundry bleaches.

In both cases once the organic soils are removed the scent molecules are broken down and dissipated by oxidation. Which is why the hydrogen peroxide works.

I'm down here in hurricane country and used to work at an apartment complex where people would move away and have the electricity disconnected with a the fridge full of food. A fridge full of vegetables and dairy product and a freezer full of fish and pork left in summer in Florida temperatures for two months is pretty bad. people downwind of us carrying it still full out of the apartment were puking. But getting the smell out of the apartments was always harder than getting it out of the refrigerators. Drywall and carpeting soak up smells.

Cleaning out the refrigerators in such condition is a nasty, time consuming job. But, as long as the interior plastic liners were intact, if rotting food gets into the insulation it is a bigger problem, we never tossed any of the refrigerators out.

Bottom line is that even a new refrigerator goes for something north of $600 so an afternoon or two of suffering is justified. Mid-line refrigerators go for closer to $1000 and high-end units are up from there.

Worse case we use to prop the doors open on a concrete slab downwind of the complex, get on rain gear and boots, use a shovel to scoop out the bulk crud, and jet the worse of it out with a hose from fifteen feet away and up wind. Then close with the issue with rubber gloves and a brush. The first half-hour is the worse. By mid morning it looked clean and the smell was tolerable. After that it was peroxide or oxygen bleach applied with a pump-up sprayer a couple of times and storage, with the door blocked open, in a hot open-air garage for a few days.

Never had one we could get right.

It is a question of what you are willing to do for $1000.

Of course, if the insurance company is going to give you a new one that changes the calculation a bit.

Good response. Personally, I would act from that perspective. You can often get the smell out if you are persistent. On the other hand, if we're talking advanced decomp, well I don't exactly know.

I'm guessing that this is as much about public health as anything. Lots of people don't the skills (or temperament) to deal with the nasty in a safe manner. (And naturally there would be a suitable amount of whining involved.) Easier to schlep it to the dump and issue Tiger Balm to the staff.

Sometimes when a fridge loses power like this, no amount of scrubbing can get the smell out...been there done that. Between the 2 of us, we scrubbed that fridge everyday for almost a week with almost every chemical cleaning product we could get our hands on.

Finally after talking to an appliance repair person, he told us the smell was from bacteria growth in the cooling system (vents) in the fridge and freezer compartments. Short of dismantling the fridge completely, no amount of cleaning will kill bacteria that you cannot get to. The cost and time to dismantle, clean then re-assemble the fridge was still no guarantee that all bacteria had been killed.

In the interests of our health, we replaced the fridge and recycled the original.

Good point, I hadn't considered that. If you have to spend money on shop time, you're almost certainly better off to buy a new one and recycle the old one.