Lethbridge’s fire department has extinguished a major grassfire but it is still trying to quell rumours swirling around a panicked public.
Southern Alberta residents are left to pick up the pieces after one of the area’s biggest grassfires scorched thousands of acres of crops and river bottom land.
The city’s fire department worked for nearly 12 hours Sunday fighting the massive blaze during a severe windstorm and several smaller fires across the region. Now fire chief Brian Cornforth commends the teamwork between upwards of 80 firefighters from various departments that put out the fire. But he said the social media spread of information led to some miscommunications about evacuation notices and additional fires and encouraged an entourage of onlookers that stalled their efforts.
“We do the best we can to narrow down, through our communications centre, where the fires are and then send out resources to manage them but we did sometimes chase (false) fires that people saw where the light was reflecting off smoke and they were streetlights. We appreciate the public being concerned, but the big thing here was that we really didn’t need to deal with the public that came out to look. That didn’t make it any easier for us. It increased our risk to our crews and to the public,” Cornforth said Monday.
Gawkers, or rubber-neckers, are common at any fire scene, he said, but the problem was amplified this time around by extreme winds.
“Had that fire shifted, and they got trapped and couldn’t get out or their vehicles stalled — they just wanted to come and look and they certainly put themselves at peril for no reason,” he said. “This one was more difficult because the access in to the area is one road in and people tend to not know where they’re going in a rural area and they should’ve stayed in the city where they were safe.”
Crews were also called out to a smaller propane fire in North Lethbridge that sparked after winds ripped off part of Lo-Cost Propane’s roof, and another grassfire burned near Raymond. Meanwhile, rumours ran rampant on sites such as Twitter about different fire locations and areas that were thought to be evacuated, something Cornforth acknowledged the department is up against when it comes to distributing accurate emergency information.
“We really count on the media to message the right information and keeping it accurate because there are a lot of things that get added out with the social media that are not necessarily factual,” he said.
The main fire started at a home on the west end of the Blood Reserve around 3:30 p.m., spreading quickly in extreme wind gusts reaching more than 130 kilometres per hour, jumping the Oldman River and burning through west Lethbridge right up to city limits at 30 Street West, north of 24 Avenue West. Two Blood Reserve homes were destroyed in the blaze and no injuries were reported.
The fire department worked with Alberta Health Services to monitor the air quality and assess affected residents for smoke inhalation, finding no immediate health concerns due to air quality.
Medical staff across the southern Alberta health region were prepared for an influx of people with respiratory problems but that didn’t materialize.
Dr. Vivien Suttorp, medical officer of health, said less than five people with minor breathing issues showed up at emergency departments. No patients were admitted because of breathing issues related to the fire.
“We didn’t see an influx of people coming into the emergency departments due to smoke inhalation across the region,” Suttorp said.
Crews worked into Monday afternoon putting out hotspots on both sides of the river. The Blood Reserve and the County of Lethbridge called in a team of 12 firefighters from the provincial Sustainable Resources Development Department, who brought with them specialized equipment including two wildland fire engines and three off-highway vehicles with water tanks. By the time they arrived, the fires were completely extinguished apart from a few still-smouldering spots. There’s still danger if the winds pick up again, Cornforth warned.
“The fire is contained. We’re just managing a couple of hot spots and some materials that are burning. If people see hot spots still smouldering, we want to know about it so we can get out there and extinguish it and work with the landowners on making sure the fire is out. If the winds shift, we don’t want it to go into another area that hasn’t been burned yet.”
The city didn’t have an estimate of the burned acreage, but the fire burned for 14 kilometres from west to east. On the Blood Reserve, land department officials estimated the blaze had burned through1,500 acres of grassland and approximately 3,000 acres in the river bottom on the reserve.
Alberta’s wildfire season officially ended on Oct. 31. In the six months prior, the provincial government responded to 1,128 fires that burned a total of 946,663 hectares across the province.
The timing and sheer spread of Sunday’s fire was what made it unusual, Chief Cornforth said.
“In southern Alberta, it’s not common to have large, large grassfires like this or wildland fires so it’s pretty unnerving to have these things happen,” he said. “For all of the region to see this go on, there was a lot of things that happened in our favour and a lot of things that people lost in these fires. Not just our fire but the fire in the Milk River ridge. People have got to think about that.”
Provincial fire officials continue to investigate the fires.