Thanks I had not heard of that . I remember the roads being blocked and RCMP mobilized to keep people out . Good on those strong folks .Came across this article in the NP today.
Into the fire: Everyone had a choice to make. Would they fight or would they flee?
In 1954, Wolfram Hummel’s father, Helmut, arrived from Germany with $50 in his pocket and a dream to live like a pioneer in the Canadian wilderness. With equal parts self-reliance, passion and grit he built Bear Hill Ranch, a 1,400-hectare mix of cattle-grazing land and harvestable timber along the south shore of François Lake, a long, narrow body of water running east-west in British Columbia’s vast northern Interior.
Last year it was Wolfram, 58, who found himself drawing on those same family characteristics as a massive forest fire bore down on his ranch. As he battled this raging inferno with flames 30 metres high, however, he also found himself tangling with an equally menacing force of government.
At first, provincial authorities simply withheld the resources necessary to fight the fire. Then, when Hummel and his neighbours chose to fight the fire on their own to save their properties, they were ordered to evacuate and let it all burn. Official indifference later shifted to outright hostility when those who defied the evacuation order were faced with authoritative rebukes and outright harassment by law enforcement.
As a deadly wall of flames advanced towards them, residents of François Lake soon found themselves asking: Is our government working for us? Or against us?
The summer of 2018 was a bad one for wildfires in Western Canada. In B.C., over 2,100 fires consumed 1.35 million hectares of forest and fields, and cost taxpayers $615 million. One of the worst started at Nadina Lake in Nadina Mountain Provincial Park, west of François Lake; another began to the south at Verdun Mountain. Driven by strong winds and hot, dry conditions, Nadina’s first treacherous tentacles began licking at the ranch lands on François Lake’s west end by early August, slowly converging on several small, tightly-knit farming communities south of the lake that are home to 1,500 fiercely proud “Southsiders.”
With his ranch in the direct path of the blaze, Hummel set to work saving what his father had built. A bearded and burly giant of a man, he used his ranch’s Caterpillar bulldozer to carve broad swaths of barren fireguards out of the forest in hopes of arresting the fire’s advance. A few like-minded landowners quickly became known collectively as The Wolf Pack.
The Wolf Pack‘s tactics were both disarmingly simple and preposterously daring. “You take the Cats and you push the trees over the overburden, then you put trails in so you can drag through hoses and create escape routes,” says Hummel in an interview. “Then you start putting the fires out. And that’s what we did — we went into the fire.”
Clint Lambert, another Wolf Packer, pushed his bulldozer to 16-hour days as the fire continued its relentless push eastward. On Aug. 22, he was forced to abandon his dozer in the bush after the starter blew. “There were 60-kilometre-an-hour winds; I was getting hit with charcoal shot out of the brush,” he recalls.
Lambert, Hummel and the rest of the Wolf Pack were largely alone in this fight, as B.C.’s Wildfire Service chose to focus its staff and material on priorities elsewhere in the province. As the situation grew more desperate, however, the whole Southside was placed under an evacuation notice. On Aug. 15 residents were told to “leave the area immediately.” Those who ignored the warning — and plenty did — were entirely on their own.
“I’ve never been in a situation in British Columbia where so many people had chosen … to stay behind,” says B.C. Wildfire Service Incident Commander Peter Laing, who headed up the official response to the François Lake fire. Laing met with about a hundred locals at a community hall a few days after the evacuation order. He says it’s the first time he’s ever held a public meeting in an area that was supposed to have been evacuated.
The Southsiders’ stubbornness also briefly caught the attention of B.C. Premier John Horgan, who told reporters anyone who stayed behind was “compromising our ability to address the fire.” Given that they were the only ones actually “addressing” the fire threatening their property, the Wolf Pack responded to the premier’s rebuke in kind.
“They told us not to try to fight the fire. They told us to evacuate, to get out. And I told them to go to Hell,” says the blunt-spoken Hummel. “We’re fighting till the very end.” According to Lambert, government officials and politicians habitually underestimate local abilities to solve local problems. “This isn’t the first wildfire that most of us have ever been in,” he says. “One of the main reasons all of us stayed here on the Southside is that … actual trained people from the forest service just weren’t here.”
“They couldn’t chase us out,” agrees 73-year-old Pixie Robertson, another defiant Southsider. “The police came here twice and said I had to leave ‘because it was going to burn me up.’ ” She, too, was having none of it. “ ‘I’ll take my chances,’ I told them. ‘Get the Hell outta my place.’ ”
Pixie’s stepson Mike Robertson — the business manager of the Cheslatta Carrier Nation, an Indigenous people with 17 small reserves scattered across the Southside — had a panoramic view of the looming disaster from his office near the ferry terminal at Southbank, on the south shore of François Lake. As the Nadina and Verdun fires closed in, the ferry became a vital link to the rest of the world. Working 24 hours a day, MV François Forester ferried a Biblical-scale exodus of cattle and other livestock across the lake to safety on the north side.
As this northward flight was occurring, however, the evacuation order suddenly became something more than just a suggestion as the RCMP set up a roadblock at the north terminal and turned dock access into an enforcement tool. Movement north escaping the flames was unimpeded, but anyone attempting to return to Southbank with fuel or supplies was either denied access or found themselves wasting valuable time pleading for a permit.
“That really put everybody in a bind,” says Mike Robertson. The RCMP had, in effect, imposed a blockade on law-abiding, taxpaying Canadian citizens whose sole transgression was attempting to save their own properties using their own equipment, money and sweat. The Mounties did not to respond to multiple interview requests regarding their tactics on the ferry dock.
Prevented from using the ferry, residents on both sides of François Lake found new ways to keep the fight going. “I dropped my boat in the water and so did many others to help ferry supplies,” says local resident Rex Glanville. A spontaneous Dunkirk-style flotilla of fishing boats and other pleasure craft was thus mobilized to ship fuel and goods across the lake to keep the Wolf Pack supplied.
“It’s crazy that people who want to stay and fight for their homes were treated as if they were under siege,” recalls local Liberal MLA John Rustad. “It was a very unsafe situation.” Rustad himself was granted just one permit to cross on the ferry during the crisis. “I tried to go in several other times but I was denied access,” he recalls.
In another grotesque official attempt at discouraging local efforts to combat the fire, outfitter Catherine Van Tine Marcinek says a provincial conservation officer came to her door requesting that she hand over her dental records. “I asked, ‘My dental records? For what reason?’ He said: ‘So we can identify your charred remains when that wall of fire comes over the hill and takes you.’ ” Van Tine Marcinek stayed regardless, adding: “Who the heck keeps their dental records at home?”
Despite the Wolf Pack’s heroic efforts and that of the many other volunteers who kept them stocked with diesel and food, the inferno continued its inexorable crawl towards the Southside’s communities and farms. By Aug. 29 it crested a steep rock-faced ridge running east-west overlooking the ranch lands. Hummel’s house was now only a few kilometres from the flames. At this point, with the commanding heights in hand, the fire paused.
The fire’s halt on the cusp of its apparent victory over the assembled human combatants was widely considered something of a miracle, although weather and the physics of combustion also played key roles. But as the Wolf Pack buckled down for one last stand, something even more miraculous occurred. The cavalry finally appeared. B.C. Wildfire Service showed up to the fight with water-bucket helicopters on Aug. 30.
“As the fire was becoming a more real threat to their properties, that was when the resources were engaged more,” says Laing matter-of-factly. With several other fires in the province subdued, it was finally the Southside’s turn to receive its share of government assistance.
And as water was now being dumped from the sky, the Wolf Pack was able to meet the enemy head-on. “We were now fighting right in the fire … because we had the air support,” Hummel remembers. By early September, the fire was finally subdued.
Over six weeks, the François Lake inferno had consumed more than 135,000 hectares and destroyed 10 homes. No lives were lost.
And for most of this time, the François Lake Southsiders were virtually alone in facing it down. “The big story is the people who stayed and fought the fires, they literally saved our community from going up in smoke,” Mike Robertson says. “If they hadn’t stayed behind we wouldn’t have anything left. There’s about three or four hundred homes that we would’ve lost.”
Despite such an obvious display of heroism, however, most Canadians have never heard of the Wolf Park, or their monumental stand at François Lake. Had this unfolded in the United States, they’d likely be national heroes, as was the case with the “Cajun Navy,” a spontaneous collection of boats and volunteers mobilized for rescue duty during Hurricane Katrina.
Beyond this lack of personal recognition, however, the Southsiders’ experience at François Lake last year should cause every Canadian to pause and reflect.
Not everyone will agree with the risks the Wolf Pack took last year. Or their rebellious decision to ignore an evacuation order. But their commitment to saving their own property lays bare the unspoken truth that no government can ever deliver continuous and comprehensive protection to all its citizens. Regardless of administrative confidence, or the persistence with which officials seek to dissuade people from solving their own problems, there will eventually come a day when the power goes out, a wildfire rages or some other disaster looms — and government help is nowhere to be found.
And when that time comes, everyone has a choice to make. Do you meekly accept your officially-mandated helplessness and flee? Or do you, like Wolfram Hummel and the Wolf Pack, take matters into your own hands — and head into the fire?
This is a condensed version of “Into the Fire” as originally published by C2C Journal. To read the full version, go to www.c2cjournal.ca
nationalpost.com/opinion/into-the-fire-everyone-had-a-choice-to-make-would-they-fight-or-would-they-flee
Winds fan ferocious fires in Australia's most populous state
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Thanks I had not heard of that . I remember the roads being blocked and RCMP mobilized to keep people out . Good on those strong folks .
When we were ordered to evacuate many of us defied the order and stayed to feed and water animals left behind. As it turned out there was no need to evacuate our area in the first place as not one of our properties were ever in danger - the fires came nowhere near us and were fairly quickly contained once crews were on the ground. What really angered us was that the order came in the middle of the night and BC Hydro cut the power to force us out. Many very elderly seniors were left in the dark trying to find what they needed to take with them. Hydro tried to say that the lines were in danger of burning but that was a load of baloney as not one of the fires came anywhere near them.
Our CRD director organized a community hall meeting later that year and had Hydro, Forestry, EMS, RCMP in attendance to answer questions. We were able to finally get Hydro to admit that there was no reason to cut the power and that had it been a real emergency, things might have been so much worse due to the outage.
We ARE apes, you gormless goit.
The apes are orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and humans.
Similarly, wolves and foxes are canines and lions and tigers are felines.
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That everything in the world was invented in jolly old england. Scurvy, rotten teeth, syphilis I would agree on but not much of any use.
The language you are writing in and the computer and World Wide Web you've used to convey your message are all British inventions.
So is your television.
So, when you're packing boxes and studying for your forklift license, you can take great pride in achievements had the square root of sweet bugger-all to do with.
Imagine a life so devoid of meaning that the only pride one can take is from a tenuous connexion with people who would call the cops if one actually approached them.
Bushfires: Firebugs fuelling crisis as arson arrest toll hits 183
By DAVID ROSS and IMOGEN REID
1:01PM JANUARY 7, 2020
More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast NSW in just three months.
183 murderous Eco terrorists. An arson crisis.
By DAVID ROSS and IMOGEN REID
1:01PM JANUARY 7, 2020
More than 180 alleged arsonists have been arrested since the start of the bushfire season, with 29 blazes deliberately lit in the Shoalhaven region of southeast NSW in just three months.
183 murderous Eco terrorists. An arson crisis.
I certainly can.
By the way, what great achievements have your people come up with, other than totem poles, wigwams and mouth slapping? Anything actually worthwhile?
Maybe because they need to increase the gene pool .
Native American women, at least in my experience, love tall White men, with Northern European features. I think it may be because they associate us with money and power, but they love having sex with us.