BEAVER LAKE - With the prospect of another wildfire season facing the region, official with the Beaver Lake Cree Nation Fire Department have been working with the Alberta Wildfire office in Lac La Biche on initiatives designed to mitigate the risk of wildfires in the Indigenous community.
Shane Bair, the director of emergency operations and fire chief for Beaver Lake Cree Nation, said his department has a mutual aid agreement with Alberta Wildfire, who sends teams to the First Nations community to do controlled burns in a bid to reduce the hazards of wildfires. He added that the Nation lies within the Alberta Forest Protection Area.
Bair explained that local fire officials have come up with a map of high-risk areas they think are present in Beaver Lake. Those areas include meadows and large fields.
“They’ve come out and burned some of that off for us,” he told Lakeland This Week.
Instead of burning off an entire field at once-that could easily get away on them-provincial wildfire crews of six firefighters focus on small strips of land, surround those areas, and then burn off little sections at a time. This, Bair said, enables them to get the job done as safely as possible.
“They do it very strategically, and they manage the fires well,” he said. “They have it down to a science where they can burn off a pretty good area in a small amount of time just doing little sections at a time to keep it under a controlled environment, basically.”
While members of the Beaver Lake Fire Department assist their provincial counterparts in doing controlled burns and other work in wide open areas, Bair continued, right now, local firefighters are more focused on helping to protect structures in the community if wildfires do become a threat.
Bair said the local fire department has a good partnership with Alberta Wildfire , who also sent crews out last year during the wildfire season for preventative measures.
“They’ve been trying to come out as much as they can,” he stated, adding that wind and other weather conditions must be right and not pose a risk in order for Alberta Wildfire teams to do controlled burns.
With the warmer months approaching and the region continuing to be affected by extremely dry conditions, Bair says right now, the outlook regarding what the wildfire season could look like is grim. Fire officials are hopeful that more rain and precipitation will arrive soon.
“If we don't, I think we will see a worse fire season than we had last year across the province.”
According to Bair, so far this spring, Beaver Lake has already experienced three fires that have burned into the ground up to two feet, burning through the organic material right down to the clay.
If the community does experience large fires, he continued, completely extinguishing them will take a considerable fight as they are digging so deep into the organic material in the ground.
The local fire department is looking at getting residents of Beaver Lake involved in keeping their community safe by keeping their lawns manicured and yards clean with incentives such as tickets to Oilers games. As of yet, this hasn’t been put into place, and the idea is being discussed with Beaver Lake administration.
Beaver Lake and Alberta Wildfire have been working on these preventative measures over the past month and will continue to do so until hotter weather and adverse conditions make such work too risky.
Bair said about this work, it’s like watching a bomb countdown, trying to reduce the hazard of fires and getting it done before the fires come.
“We’ll try to get as much done as the weather permits and as the conditions permit,” he said.