The devastation of Enterprise and its path to recovery

The day before a wildfire tore through Enterprise, residents were celebrating at a jamboree with music, food and crafts that drew hundreds of people.

By the night of August 13, the fast-moving fire had destroyed the majority of homes, buildings and other property in the small hamlet, leaving a heart-wrenching scene of smouldering debris and ashes.

The same fire damaged a fibre line, leading to a lengthy communications outage in the region.

Wildfire officials say they dedicated resources to fighting the fire early on, but extreme conditions made it unstoppable.

Even so, some leaders wonder whether more could have been done.

“It would have been nice to have some more advanced warning,” said Blair Porter, the senior administrative officer for Enterprise.

“It would have been nice, perhaps, to have some indication that this was a possibility, and perhaps something else could have been done. There’s no guarantees about that, but we’ll never know now.”

Porter said the hamlet was proactive early in the season, activating its wildfire plan and creating fire breaks after a separate fire threatened Hay River and the Kátł’odeeche First Nation in May.

But those breaks were designed to give crews access to address potential wildfire threats, he said, not to stop an oncoming fire.

“By the time we found out about what was going on, there was no way that was going to happen, and those fire breaks didn’t stand a chance,” he said.

Mayor Michael St Amour, who couldn’t be reached by Cabin Radio, told the CBC he was frustrated at what he called a lack of communication from the NWT government – and a lack of resources to protect his community, such as sprinklers.

‘That will haunt me for the rest of my life’

Events unfolded quickly on August 13.

Just before 11am, the Department of Infrastructure stated the wildfire could cause reduced visibility and delays on Highway 1, the road that runs through Enterprise and effectively forms its main street.

By 3pm, an evacuation order had been issued. Residents of Enterprise, plus the communities of Hay River and the Kátł’odeeche First Nation to the north, were forced to flee as the wildfire rapidly approached.

Some drove through thick smoke and heat as flames licked the sides of the highway, while others had to be airlifted out.

Deh Cho MLA Ron Bonnetrouge, whose district includes Enterprise, called for an investigation of Enterprise’s demise at an emergency legislature sitting on Monday.

“My big concern there is the lead time leading up to the fire,” he said.

“That will haunt me for the rest of my life. What happened? Where were the crews? Why was no advanced warning given?”

Finance minister Caroline Wawzonek responded that senior members of the firefighting team had called the wildfire situation “a nightmare.”

“They were outright shell-shocked,” Wawzonek said.

“We were all, I think, affected by watching one of the communities of the Northwest Territories be so decimated by a wildfire.”

‘We’ve done everything we could’

Two hours after the wildfire was first discovered on August 2, crews were on the ground and air tankers in the sky attacking it, wildfire information officer Mike Westwick told Cabin Radio

The fire was initially mapped at three hectares burned, 43 kilometres northwest of Enterprise and 11 kilometres south of Highway 1. Two hours later, that had grown to 120 hectares burned.

Even with the maximum amount of work to suppress the fire, Westwick said, it continued to grow. A combination of strong winds, long-term drought and built-up fuel led to the devastation that unfolded, he said.

“We’ve done everything we could from step one, from day one, from hour one to fight that fire, to prevent it from getting where it is,” he said.

“But nature has fought back every step of the way.”

While winds in the area were forecast to reach 50 km/h on August 13, gusts ended up reaching 70 to 80 km/h, Westwick said. He said the fire travelled 50 kilometres on the day it reached Enterprise, more than twice the maximum distance that wildfire experts had thought possible.

He described a photo of the fire barrelling toward the hamlet as “one of the scariest things” he had ever seen.

“It wouldn’t have mattered how many people you put in front of that thing, it wouldn’t have stopped that,” Westwick said.

“When a fire is moving at a speed that is almost as incomprehensible as that was, when a flame front is that high, in terms of putting people in front of that fire, that’s not something you do.

“The first thing that you need to protect when you’re managing emergencies is human life, and that includes firefighters.”

Westwick acknowledged what happened in Enterprise was a “tragedy of enormous proportions,” saying the community has been in his thoughts every day.

“There’s absolutely nothing that anyone could say that could repair anyone’s feelings about what happened there,” he said.

Shane Thompson, the NWT’s environment and communities minister, said this week that an examination of what happened to Enterprise would form part of the territory’s standard, annual wildfire season review.

“Reviews are a really important part of what we do,” Westwick added. “We work to learn, and grow, and improve-upon after every incident that occurs.”

The future of Enterprise

Dolphus Cadieux is among people who lost their home and other property in Enterprise. Only his statue of a trapper was unscathed.

“I’m just waiting, like everybody else,” he said by phone from Grande Prairie, the Alberta community in which he sought shelter.

“We’ve been hit pretty hard, and hopefully no other communities go through what we have.”

Cadieux is not yet sure exactly what kinds of support he’ll be able to receive, but he plans to return to the North, which he said is his home.

Former Hay River mayor Brad Mapes, who owns an industrial property outside Enterprise that includes a rail yard, said the fire went through his land. It destroyed timber, halted work to load rail cars and cut off power.

However, Mapes does not believe the fire will have a huge impact on his business interests, which include a pellet mill and other ventures billed as big job creators for the South Slave region. He said he was able to save equipment and buildings, and the rail line survived.

“I’m a longtime resident of Hay River and I love the South Slave and the North, and I was really worried about our community,” he said.

“NWT Fire, the community of Enterprise and Hay River, they’ve done an amazing job on getting things going, and we’ll get through it.”

People whose property was damaged may be able to get funding from insurance companies or the territory’s disaster assistance policy. Officials are looking into supports such as temporary housing, which Porter, the senior administrative officer, said may be covered by insurance.

The hamlet is working on a recovery plan, he said, and will rebuild what was lost – but that will take time.

Porter said seven people still in the hamlet are focused on firefighting efforts. He said the hamlet must be safe, have essential services in place, and have properties assessed for insurance and disaster assistance claims before residents can return.

“It’s still an active fire zone. There’s a lot of smoke up there, which is hazardous, it’s toxic,” he said.

“We don’t want to add injury to insult, so to speak, by having personal injury added onto the damage that has already been done.”

Larger, more catastrophic fires

The wildfire that devastated Enterprise continues to burn – it’s the same one that remains a threat to Hay River and the Kátł’odeeche First Nation, where evacuation orders continue.

Officials have said the fire’s burn area is now more than six times the size of Edmonton.

Wildfire officials have pledged to get residents home to Hay River long before the snow falls. NWT Fire said the town and surrounding areas were successfully defended on Friday amid challenging conditions, including gusting winds.

Westwick says an issue partly driving this year’s extraordinary NWT wildfire season is the amount of built-up fuel in the environment.

Across Canada, he said, the common practice used to be for firefighters to put out forest fires quickly, no matter where they were burning, allowing fuel (unburned wood, as well as leaves, needles, twigs and other burnable materials on the forest floor, in other words) to accumulate.

Where the Enterprise wildfire burned, for example, Westwick said there was no recent fire history. Referring to an index used to measure fuel build-up, he said the index reached 110 to 120 in the area. On that index, a score of 90 and above is considered extreme.

(Where the Behchokǫ̀ and Yellowknife wildfire has been burning, Westwick said, crews had quickly extinguished 61 naturally caused fires over the years. As a result, the fuel build-up index there exceeded 200.)

That build-up of burnable material, combined with hot, dry temperatures and windy weather this summer, has led to “larger, more catastrophic fires that are more difficult to manage,” Westwick said.

“It’s a really difficult thing for us, as human beings, to comprehend the idea that something might actually just be more powerful than us,” he said.

“A fire in the boreal forest, under those kinds of conditions, is one of those things that is.”