For two weeks at the end of June, Kara Oikarinen, a Washburn Forester Ranger with the Wisconsin DNR, worked in an extremely remote area of Ontario on the Sioux Lookout #18 fire.
There were no roads to take her and her four crewmates to the fire’s edge where they’d be working. Instead, they had to be dropped off by a helicopter.
“The best openings are often the edge of a swamp. They do their best to land in as dry and open a place as they can find,” said Oikarinen. “You get your gear and yourself dumped out, everyone crouches down low, and they take off.”
From there the crew would search for a good water source and a drier spot to set up camp and build a helipad.
Then the work fighting the fire begins.
Armed with some hand tools, a water pump, and 1,600 feet of hose that’s an inch and a half wide, they spray down the hot edge of fire working in a few feet to try and contain it.
“It's finding the edge of the fire, spraying that hot edge out, and working in at least a few feet depending on the fuel and what kind of flames you might have or smoldering,” she said.
Oikarinen says it’s a much different experience from working on wildfires in Wisconsin or even in the Western U.S.
In Wisconsin, fire crews can typically use heavy equipment like dozers to create or widen a containment line around a fire to help prevent or slow its spread.
“I have a dozer that is stationed at my office, and the operator is amazing. So I have a six foot wide scraped fire line very quickly, whereas I'm using an inch and a half hose and water up there, but that's all I can do, since there's no road access,” said Oikarinen as she explained one of the big differences between fires here and in Canada.
Even what was burning was a change from Wisconsin.
“Like for Ontario and the boreal forests that are burning, it can burn all the way down to rock, but that's pretty deep, or it can stay smoldering in this sphagnum moss layer for who knows how long,” said Oikarinen.
While Oikarinen experience 14 days of it, she’s amazed at the determination of the fire crews from Canada that have been doing this all summer.
“They are giving it an extraordinary effort, and the time that so many of these firefighters stay out away from their families is wild. The fact that they camp for 14 days in the absolute middle of nowhere, cooking their own food, with wet boots,” she said. “In the springtime, they face their hose lines freezing. Later in the afternoon, your clothing gets soaked with water, and can rub your knees raw.”
As of August first, there were nearly 700 fires burning across Canada, fewer than 200 of which were considered held or under control. Most of the fires are started by lightning.
Oikarinen can’t speak to the current fire situation, but back in June when she was working the fire, she said she could feel the stress of the people in the region.
“They were prioritizing fires, looking at potentially shortages of crews, shortages of equipment,” she said. “That was something we faced, was pump breakdowns and knowing that there was a limited number of pumps available as fires in Ontario and adjacent were growing.”
As northern Wisconsin has seen the air quality drop to the very unhealthy levels at times this past week because of the smoke that pours from these wildfires, Oikarinen hopes people keep in mind the sheer size of the fires the firefighters are dealing with.
“They're making the choice about trying to steer as much as possible a fire away from a remote community, because it will be weeks and weeks before it's possible to touch all of the fire's edge with water, and even at that point, if there's unburned fuel in the middle, it can pop up again and push over your line,” said Oikarinen. “I want people to understand the scale and that there are not barriers like roads to work off of. They're hooking in from remote lake to remote lake.”
The Wisconsin DNR has sent staff to assist on more than 65 fires this year out West and in Canada.
