This is the biggest gap in Northwest Territories wildfire fighting

Fire chiefs in NWT communities threatened by 2023’s wildfires say they feel much more prepared now if the worst happens again. But there’s one thing they want.

They want what Alberta has: a dedicated program for fighting wildfires at the exact point where the fire crosses from the forest into a community.

This is called the wildland-urban interface. Some people call it WUI (“woo-ee”) for short. It’s where the forest ends and houses start.

Fort Smith’s wildfire on Saturday, which briefly triggered an evacuation alert, is exactly the kind of fire we’re talking about.

In the Northwest Territories, if the wildfire is in the forest, the NWT government’s wildland fire crews handle it. If there’s a fire in the community, the community’s fire hall and its structural firefighters are in charge.

But when a wildfire moves from the forest to the community’s edge, the GNWT wildland crews and community structural crews need to be on exactly the same page and working closely together. If they aren’t, things go wrong.

“In Slave Lake, we lost about a third of that community in six hours,” says Rodney Schmidt, who has been the northern Alberta town of High Level’s fire chief for about a quarter of a century.

The Slave Lake fire in 2011 was an example of things going wrong. It formed the start of Alberta’s wake-up call, then the Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016 became the tipping point.

“The municipality was doing one thing and wildland was doing the other thing. We were working for similar results but we weren’t working in unison,” says Schmidt of the Fort McMurray response.

“There were cases where we had to ground air tankers because the city was flying helicopters. We had no food for the structural firefighters. They were breaking into stores to try to feed themselves for the first four days of the incident.

“We said: We can’t do this again.”

What Alberta put in place

If your wildland and community crews can each use the same apparatus, talk in the same terms, understand the same strategies and work together right down to operating the same radios, you have a much better chance of successfully fending off a wildfire at your community’s edge.

To figure that out, Alberta crews used a $1.6-million grant in 2019 to put virtually anyone who mattered inside the same room at the province’s Hinton wildfire training centre.

Emergency management officials, Alberta Wildfire, federal representatives and municipal emergency and fire managers were all included.

For three days, Schmidt said, those people ran through all kinds of mock incidents involving different communities. By the end, they had drawn up what they called “unified command response guidelines.” Now, it’s simply called the coordinated response.

It sets out who does what and how everyone fits into the grander plan when multiple agencies need to attack the same fire.

Three months after those meetings, the Chuckegg Creek wildfire broke out near High Level. Schmidt’s community was evacuated. The first wildland crew that arrived to help had been at the same workshop in Hinton.

“We all looked at each other and we said, ‘I guess we know what we’re doing. We’re going to follow the plan we just built.’ And we did it,” said Schmidt.

“We went into full unified command between the municipality and Alberta Wildfire. It turned out to be one of the most successful incidents in Alberta history in terms of how it was managed.”

Alberta’s WUI response now involves specialists like Schmidt, a series of four training programs and a plan to have eight dedicated teams in place by the end of this year.

Hay River’s debt to WUI

The NWT has nothing like that, and nor can the territory – with its vast size and comparatively tiny population – fully replicate it. But fire crews are ready to learn.

“The wildfires of 2023 showed us just how vital WUI firefighting teams can be,” says Vince McKay. A member of Hay River’s fire department for 30 years, McKay is now the territory’s minister of communities and infrastructure.

He says the hamlet of Enterprise, severely damaged by a fire in August 2023, might have been lost entirely were it not for the actions of a specialist WUI team and some residents.

WUI crews from Alberta also joined forces with Hay River’s fire hall to help protect the town that month. Hay River hadn’t had that benefit when a separate fire occurred in May. Town fire chief Travis Wright says the difference between working on the two fires was “night and day.”

“High Level drove through the fire to Hay River and they arrived that night,” Wright said of the August fire.

“Even just on my side with the structural protection division, we were running probably 100 firefighters, up to 40 pieces of different apparatus. It was a beast to manage logistically – food, beds and people flying in, flying out, changing out shifts. You’re planning weeks in advance.

“We gained a lot of experience going through that event and we had a great unified command with ECC, working together and planning together.”

Wright said May’s fire, by comparison, had been Hay River’s firefighters “running around trying to defend our community the best we knew how.”

Mayor of Hay River Kandis Jameson goes further.

“The only reason that Hay River is still Hay River is because of WUI,” Jameson said last month.

She remembers flying out of the town on a Hercules aircraft as all but the most essential personnel were evacuated in August 2023’s bleakest moments. The fire appeared about to consume Hay River’s water treatment plant.

When the Hercules landed in Alberta, Jameson called Wright.

“How are we doing, Trav? Did we lose our water treatment plant?”

“No.”

“Are you just saving my sanity?”

“No, this thing’s really still standing.”

Wright says bringing a dedicated WUI program to the Northwest Territories “is something we all want to see and the biggest change that our fire service needs to go through.”

“The more we can work together and cross-train and hopefully get a program in place, we’ll be able to help each other in those times of need,” he said.

“We wouldn’t have been able to manage that fire alone in August without those resources. That made the difference between a lot of our community standing.”

What can the NWT achieve?

The challenge now is to devise and fund a WUI program that can be adopted by NWT communities no matter their size and isolation.

Already, some communities are working to strengthen a form of mutual aid that allows crews to come in and help when one place is in danger. A WUI program would take that further with training and a more formalized approach.

Whatever program is rolled out needs to help Fort Liard, on a highway just north of BC, as much as it helps Fort Good Hope, with no road access in the middle of the Sahtu.

“We want to see a culture of preparedness developed. We want to focus on building a stronger wildland-urban interface training and response framework,” said NWT Fire’s Mike Westwick.

Westwick was speaking at a wildfire preparedness workshop hosted by the NWT Association of Communities in April, as were Schmidt, McKay, Wright and Jameson. Bringing together fire chiefs and community leaders from across the territory, the workshop was the first of its kind.

“This is going to take a lot of work. We’ve got unique needs and considerations within the territories. We really can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach,” Westwick told those gathered at the workshop. “We’ll be bringing folks together on that a fair bit over the next couple of years.”

“Right now, we have a gap in our wildfire response to the NWT when it comes to wildland-urban interface firefighting,” McKay had said in an earlier workshop session.

“A WUI program could give communities better tools, foster faster response rates and a real chance to protect themselves in a wildfire event. Fires don’t stop at municipal boundaries, so we need to coordinate.”

McKay is hopeful that some meaningful progress will be made by the end of the year, though the overall work will take much longer than that and, ultimately, represents a sustained commitment to changing how NWT wildfires are fought.

“One of the biggest gaps was basically where the forest ends and the houses begin. We do houses, ECC does forest, but what happens in between and how are we managing that? That was not really clear,” said Fort Smith fire chief Adam McNab at the same workshop, describing his experience in 2023.

McNab and Fort Smith’s firefighters operated in an environment where the GNWT, Alberta and Parks Canada all had resources committed to fires that spanned jurisdictions.

While that led to some confusion and a steep learning curve at the onset of 2023’s fires, McNab was able to see crews begin to implement WUI best practices.

“When you see it working with professionals that do it regularly, it works really well, and it was really impressive,” he said.

“We have a different context in this territory and certainly, we can’t do everything exactly like Alberta, but a lot of what we need to adopt is really working to the same unified, standard approach. When we’re calling on these resources, we want to speak the same language.”

‘In a much better position’

A WUI program for the NWT doesn’t guarantee every fire will be successfully fought. Schmidt points to recent losses in Jasper as an example that even with Alberta’s program in place, “sometimes there’s nothing you can do.”

But coupled with the huge amount of lived experience some northern communities have from 2023, improving the communication and coordination between agencies feels like a big jigsaw piece that can make a meaningful difference.

“I still think the gap of an actual WUI program in the Territories is limiting,” said Wright.

“Having that in place allows us all to flow with each other a lot more smoothly. It’s a team effort. The world we’re trained to play in is the structural defence, and working together is going to give the best response for any community.”

If an incident on the scale of 2023 happened again this summer, Wright feels “experience is the best teacher.”

“We understand how to structure ourselves in a way to defend that community, protecting that critical infrastructure, knowing how to evaluate and apply the tactics you need,” he said.

“Training your group for that response is something we’ve had to do. Now we’ve had to do it, I feel we’re in a much better place to respond to that situation.”

“Wildland-urban interface support and having that program in the territory, I think, is my big hope for the future,” said McNab.

“The conversation is moving in the right direction, so I’m really excited about that. If this were to happen again tomorrow, I think we’re in a much better position for the experiences that we had. We know much better the resources we need. We have the roadmap for how to do it again.”