Читать книгу Captured by Fire - Chris Czajkowski - Страница 10

Chris

Kleena Kleene, July 8

The following morning was calm, hazy with smoke and already hot, even though the sun had not been up very long. It was shaping up to be another thirty-degree day. What were the fires doing this morning?

The BC Wildfire Service Active Wildfires website is useful for a quick glance. New fires are red, less active ones are amber, and those under control or out are yellow. Serious fires boast a little icon representing flames. These are designated “Wildfires of Note.” There were groups of these around Williams Lake and Lee’s Corner, and several more were scattered throughout the province. The Riske Creek area, halfway between Lee’s Corner and Williams Lake, was already blowing into quite a big fire, though we had seen nothing of it while driving by. The 108 Fire had its little bunch of flames, as did another serious-looking one north of Ashcroft, which would be a major player during the season and become known as the Elephant Hill Fire. I heard later that ninety-seven fires had started on the same day, all from lightning strikes.

The fire positions are presumably automatically loaded from a satellite and are usually fairly accurate. One is supposed to be able to click on the little flame icons and get an update, but in my experience these pages are all but useless. One can make the excuse that, in 2017, the Cariboo Fire Centre was overwhelmed, but every fire I have been involved with in the past has shown the information to be arbitrary and often many days out of date.

This is a map of the local Kleena Kleene area. It is based on Natural Resource Canada’s Interactive Maps, July 10, 2017. Drawn by Chris Czajkowski.

The USDA Forest Service Fire Detection Maps have the same colour coding, but they show the shape of the fires superimposed on a satellite map. The area around Williams Lake, Riske Creek, Lee’s Corner, and for some distance north and south showed splotches of yellow heavily spotted with amber and red. Farther west, and north of the highway, there was another group of fires and, close to home, was a small blob representing our local Kleena Kleene blaze. Nearby, quite a way back from the highway, was a small red dot at the head of Colwell Lake, a glacier-fed body of water buried in a deep trench. I had once looked down upon it from a nearby mountain and knew it to be a startling turquoise blue.

Another red dot was of some concern to me. It was not big enough to be a “Wildfire of Note” so there was no additional information available, but it was, as far as I could judge, only two kilometres north of my house. Winds did not often travel at great speeds from that direction, but there was no natural barrier between us and the fire; no road, river, swamp or large area of water. In highly incendiary conditions, a blaze smaller than a campfire can grow very rapidly.

Strings of bald sand hills bracket my property. From these dunes there is quite an extensive view of the country toward the mountains. The McClinchy Creek runs below the hills; Highway 20, backed by forested foothills, lies parallel half a kilometre away. The mountains behind them are not all that high, but a good portion of them is above the treeline and they never quite lose all their snow.

Miriam and I trudged up the loose, silty slopes of the dunes to where we could see the view uninterrupted by trees. Haze-filtered sunlight cast pale shadows. Two or three grey plumes from where we had seen the flames the evening before were contributing to the poor visibility, but now we were high enough to see more smoke coming from between the next two ridges; they would be on either side of Colwell Creek. In the distance we could hear the rhythmic beat of a helicopter. Just looking and assessing, or was it doing actual firefighting?

Behind us, the land was only slightly hilly; small, forested swells eventually culminated in a gentle rise of land on which old logging scars were visible. The red dot on the BC Wildfire Services site showed that the lone northern fire should have been well in front of the old clear-cuts, but we could see no indication of it. However, as we stood there, the heli-noise increased and a Bell 407 detached itself from the main fire area and flew within binocular range. It bore the insignia of White Saddle Air, a thriving helicopter business south of Tatla Lake, and was likely piloted by Mike King. The chopper was slinging a large red bucket on a long cable. The lip of the bucket trailed a comet-tail spray of water that glittered in the smoke-veiled sunlight. The pilot headed directly toward where I had estimated the north fire to be, hovered low, and despite the thick haze, we could see an upward spray of smoke, ash and steam. So a fire was there. The pilot had brought his first load of water from a lake south of the highway, but now he hunted around the nearby country for swampy pockets that contained puddles big enough for his purpose, and to my surprise he found a few. Despite the rapid browning and crisping of the country, rivers and ponds were still relatively high.

This is a diagram of Chris’s view at Kleena Kleene during the early part of the fire. Drawn by Chris Czajkowski.

The motion a helicopter makes when it picks up water reminds me of nothing other than a broody hen settling on her eggs. The pilot dumped several loads on the site; steam and ash flew every time, but eventually he headed back to the main fire. Although he disappeared into the distance and smoke, we could hear that he was repeating the exercise at various other locations. White Saddle was operating two choppers that day, but alone they would make very little impact. We would not be able to expect much assistance from farther afield for a while. The firefighting machine generally takes at least a week to get going, and any firefighters that might be mobilized this year would be deployed around the much bigger centres. The choppers droned steadily throughout the day; later we heard one coming back overhead. No sound of the bobbing and lifting associated with the bucketing, just circling, then returning from where it had come. That tiny fire was out. We never saw any activity there again. I was to thank our firefighters time and time again for that propitious intervention.

One more fire was of concern to me. It was between my place and the coast. Lightning had struck a bluff beside the Atnarko River, near Stillwater Lake. I had built my first cabin beside that river, a half-day’s walk south of the lake (there are no roads in there). It had been destroyed in the 2004 Lonesome Lake Fire. By then I had long since ceased to live there and the cabin’s destiny had been to return to nature; it just happened sooner than expected. The area around the Stillwater, at that time, had remained unburned. I zoomed in on the USDA map and could see that the strike was right above where the Hotnarko River spills into the Atnarko.

The Hotnarko is spawned in the Chilcotin and runs into a steep, wild canyon before reaching the valley bottom. Steep hillsides act as chimneys; eagles, condors and hang-gliders make use of these updrafts; they welcome nature’s helping hand. But fires love them also; they are the most likely climate conditions to send a blaze out of control.

The direction of the Hotnarko valley is northeast to southwest. In this country, southwest winds are the wildest and most violent. (It was a southwest wind that was blasting through Lee’s Corner as we drove by.)

Friends of mine lived above the Hotnarko Canyon in a place where the valley widened enough to support a ranch and a market garden. The distance between them and the strike was only ten kilometres. In 2004, the southwest wind had driven the Lonesome Lake Fire along the upper Atnarko River twenty kilometres in two days. My friends’ properties could be in very great danger.