Fort Simpson wonders if it’s next in the line of fire

“We’ve got to look at all these things, because people are not going to choose to live in dangerous places.”

Sean Whelly, the mayor of Fort Simpson, is sitting in a village café on a Monday evening. Behind him, the Martin Hills to the southwest rise up above the island on which much of the village sits.

There’s a sliver of water and not much else between the trees and the community. That forest mostly comprises dry, decades-old timber, Whelly says. “If a fire came right to the top of the hill over Fort Simpson, it’d be raining pine needles down on this town.”

Two years ago, Fort Simpson spent its summer recovering from a damaging flood. Now, it’s one of the few communities in the NWT emerging relatively untouched from the territory’s most devastating wildfire season on record.

But Whelly, with an eye on that forest, knows Fort Simpson could well be next in line – and could have suffered far worse, but for the extra rain its surrounding Dehcho region received this summer compared to areas like Yellowknife, Hay River and Fort Smith.

“It’s quite worrying. We ended up with just enough moisture this summer to escape all the dangers that almost every other community in the North faced,” he told Cabin Radio.

“It feels like a riskier place than it ever was before. People don’t talk about it every day. I suppose we talked a lot about all the other communities more than we talked about ourselves. Maybe that was just kind-of putting off what was on the top of our minds.”

Fort Simpson has the Liard and Mackenzie rivers offering sizeable natural fire breaks, but the village is by no means immune to a forest fire. And if one arrives, it would have to reach the village from a specific direction – the region of the highway to Wrigley, curving away to the southwest and west – to give residents any hope of leaving.

Even then, a ferry that can transport about 60 vehicles an hour is the only way to get cars to safety, meaning the village would need not only for the fire to be in a certain place, but also a good deal of time to successfully coordinate an evacuation. And that’s if the water level is high enough for the ferry to run.

In any other circumstances, Fort Simpson would need to shelter in place at the village arena. That makes safeguarding the vicinity of the arena a priority.

“The island itself needs to be at least made as safe as possible,” said Whelly.

The village is working to expand a fire guard that would help to stall a fire coming in from the east toward Fort Simpson. But it’s also starting work to thin out the big spruce trees that form much of the forest on the island itself.

“There’ll be a lot more work, I think, done in the fall and winter here,” the mayor said, referring to firesmarting being paid for with some of the $1 million or so Fort Simpson is receiving in federal funding.

But Whelly says the village really needs more like $5 million to do the work it thinks will keep the community safe.

“If we can’t get five times that money, we’re still going to be at quite a risk, I think, if this drought continues,” he said. “Long term, it seems the federal government is going to have to step up to really give communities the protection that they need.”

Fighting for the NWT’s future

“I’ve walked through a lot of the forests around our community. There are a lot of areas that need a lot of work,” said Chief Kele Antoine of the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation.

“There are a lot of untouched areas that have not had any burns in our recorded history, really.”

Does he have sleepless nights about a forest fire?

“Every night,” he said.

Chief Antoine agrees that fire breaks need to be widened, and he wants the resulting firewood and timber to be put to use rather than wasted.

“It’d be really nice to harvest a lot of that biomass for firewood for Elders and community members,” he said.

“The big timber? That should be harvested for various projects around the community such as picnic tables, benches, maybe gazebos and such, garden boxes for our people. And just try to not waste and really, really take a good, hard, Dene take on harvesting from the land.”

Antoine wants to partner with the village and the Métis Nation in Fort Simpson to “formulate a large-scale proposal” for federal firesmarting funding. Given what has happened elsewhere in the NWT and Canada this summer, he thinks levels of government will be prepared to have that conversation.

He hopes various groups in the village can “come together as a community, talk about it together, and get some guidance from our Elders, because their traditional knowledge has been proven right so many times that we have to listen to them, and we’ve got to take direction from them.”

In the meantime, Whelly acknowledges residents are probably unsettled.

“It’s worrisome from all aspects. Worrisome in terms of: should I build a house here? What kind of insurance would I get? Would I be protected? Is the territorial government’s disaster assistance policy even good enough to protect me if I want to continue to live here? So many questions, I think, that come into the minds of people,” the mayor said.

“Yes, we are trying to do things to protect ourselves, but we realize we’re in quite a dangerous spot overall. And hopefully, given some more resources and enough time, we’ll be able to lessen those risks quite a bit.

“We all have experienced, now, some level of disaster in this Northwest Territories. It’s not somebody else’s problem any more. … We have to lobby together, fight together for, really, the future of the Northwest Territories and make those decisions that are going to get us back into a place where people want to live here.”

Antoine described a water ceremony held in August by the Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́ First Nation and Dehcho First Nations, laying tobacco at Gros Cap, where the Mackenzie and Liard rivers come together.

“We were very lucky,” Antoine said. “The next morning, we got some rain.”

He takes that as a sign of a possible path forward for the territory’s peoples.

“I think there’s a lot of power when people come together with like minds,” he said.

“If we can continue to do that, not just here in Fort Simpson but in the whole North, I think we’re going to bounce back just fine.”