More than 40 millimeters of rain over the weekend helped wildfire fighters get the Jasper Wildfire Complex under control.
The wet weather, which began on August 23 and continued throughout the next day, will make it easier for emergency crews to extinguish deep, dangerous pockets of embers in key, active areas of the still-burning wildfire. Some areas, including near Overlander Creek northeast of the town of Jasper, received nearly 49 mm of rainfall, according to Parks Canada.
“If the event had taken place in the winter, it would have been a day with almost 50 centimeters of powder,” said incident commander Landon Shepherd. “It was pretty impressive.”
Despite the heavy rain, however, firefighters are still cautious of deep pockets – areas where the fire has “burrowed” into root pockets and places in the forest that are clogged with dead wood and organic debris. In such areas – such as the steep, north-facing, shaded mountain slopes or in the washouts of seasonally flooded rivers – large amounts of fuel can accumulate, allowing the fire to spread.
“Some of these ash pits are chest deep,” Shepherd said. “That makes it particularly dangerous for crews because you think you’re standing on solid ground, but as the fire spreads, the ground can suddenly become quite unstable.”
Shepherd said that while crews will have to return to some of these ash pits, the rain will ultimately make that work more efficient. Also, in areas where firefighters were planning strategies to access rough terrain – such as in canyons and ravines on Whistlers Bench and on the south side of Maligne Road – some of those dangerous tasks are no longer necessary because of the rain.
“This takes away the question of how the hell we’re going to investigate this place,” Shepherd said. “It was a very nice gift.”
But more than the rain, Shepherd said, what kept the fire at bay was thousands of hours of front-line work and the use of unprecedented resources. Using hand tools like axes and Polaskis to remove fuel, pumping water from beaver dams, ponds and other water sources, and changing the direction of the fire’s convection column by lighting fuel in the path of the wildfire from behind, hordes of emergency responders were able to extinguish large portions of the fire where it threatened to spread.
“They just kept banging on things,” Shepherd said. “It was unbelievable how they destroyed this huge fence.”
That was before the heavy rains. Since then, firefighters have been able to withdraw their crews, confident that the progress they have made will not require them to fight the Jasper Wildfire Complex into late fall, as once feared.
“If it gets any warmer out there, we won’t reduce the number, but it feels like we’ll only have a handful of teams available by the end of the week,” he said.
Bob Covey // [email protected]
