Local fire crews back home after battling blazes in B.C. for five weeks

 All Clearwater Regional Fire Crews who were in British Columbia helping battle blazes over the last five weeks are all home now.

Five different crews of four or five members were deployed on July 19. They helped with structural protection in much of Williams Lake and Loon Lake during the first couple weeks then the last few weeks were in the Clinton area helping battle the fire at Elephant Hill.

“What the structural protection does is, we’re going in front of these big fires setting up big sprinkler systems, pumps and hoses to protect houses and getting out of the way and letting the fire hit them. So what that did to the equipment was a big challenge” said CRFRS Fire Chief Steve Debienne.

Firefighters were able to protect and save 400 to 500 homes and buildings.

Also during the deployment CRFRS was asked by the B.C. Fire Commissioner if some of the senior officers who had already spent time in B.C. would come back and be a structural protection specialist.

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“So basically running the structural protection unit branch” says Debienne. “So myself and Evan Stewart [our assistant Chief] went out to Quesnel, so he was looking after [as a specialist] the west Quesnel complex, and I was taking over the east Quesnel complex and we did that for a duration of 10 days.”

Since then, all those fires that they were working on separately all came together and is now a very large scale fire.

Over the five week duration, crews were kept very busy as they tried to keep crews to a seven-to-seven operation working day by pulling 12 to 14 hour days.

“The crews were really put to the test.”

Debienne says that this deployment did a lot for their organization either by getting CRFRS name out there, the experience, as well as getting the opportunity to work with international firefighters and he says that is a great feeling to see.

“The nice thing is as a Chief and the warm and fuzzy feeling from the Fire Commissioner is our crews were the go-to crew. We were held onto, we were used in areas where they wouldn’t use other crews because they knew they could give us an assignment and let us do it, and we would go and do it.”

Equipment that was used in B.C. is currently being serviced to get it back up and operational.

“A period of time of that big of a run was very hard on equipment and it does get a lot of exercise” added Debienne.

On September 7, Debienne says that they plan on doing a presentation to the public about their deployment.