Conditions last Thursday, May 15, were perfect for wildfire and wildfire is exactly what happened. High winds, warm temperatures and low humidity combined with an ignition of unknown (or at least unconfirmed) origin to send a fire raging through the Wagner area, threatening several homes.
As it turned out, the fire spared the houses, but according to the municipal district, it burned some outbuildings. It also destroyed a few vehicles.
The fire started in the late afternoon. According to M.D. #124 Reeve Denny Garratt, it appeared to have started in the ditch on the north side of Hwy. 2, west of the landfill intersection. The fire then moved quickly eastward, crossing both Hwy. 2 and Southshore Drive.
Residents in its path were evacuated on very short notice. They had no time to save much, if anything, let alone set up sprinklers. But they got lucky.
“Our place is an oasis of green in the middle of all the black,” said Karl Gongos, whose house was directly in the line of fire.
Garratt says somebody upstairs must have been looking out for the people, given the conditions. The wind was gusting up to 80 or 90 kilometres an hour, but somehow, a combination of good fortune and heavy water bombing stopped the fire’s eastward advance sometime in the night.
The air tanker effort was quite risky due to the extreme winds, says Iain Johnston, who was duty officer on May 16 at Forestry.
“Even real experienced flyers had trouble yesterday,” he said. “When they dropped, sometimes it was blowing up instead of down.”
Johnston says under those conditions, the tankers probably would have been called off for safety reasons under normal circumstances. But when human habitation is at risk, the circumstances aren’t normal.
Garrat has nothing but praise for the air tanker personnel.
“Those guys, they saved the day,” he says.
Garratt says he watched from his house as four Ducks came in over the bay in front of Canyon Creek (one of the few areas of open water in the lake) one after the other, every eight minutes, hour after hour.
Other planes flew loads of fire retardant from the Slave Lake airport back and forth. On Friday morning its red stain could be seen on the highway; it also coloured the Sawridge pond eight kilometres west of town.
On the ground, SRD crews worked all night to contain the spread, building a fire guard that continued through Friday.
Sometime fairly early on that day, SRD downgraded the fire from ‘Out of Control’ to ‘Being Held.
M.D. #124 staff, meanwhile, burned the midnight oil coordinating evacuation logistics and other matters for the affected residents as well as answering many phone calls.
“I can’t say enough about our M.D. guys,” Garratt says.
Rumours about the fire were rampant and inaccurate, thanks in part to the absence of any local radio broadcasts. The local radio station went off the air just before 6:00 p.m. due to a totally unrelated fire on Marten Mountain, where its broadcast facility is located. Pauline DeJong of The Fox told The Leader she was told a wire had come down and started the fire, and no one was allowed up the mountain to fix it until the next day. The Fox resumed broadcasting around 1:00 p.m. the next day.
Residents were back in their houses on Friday.
“We’re really impressed with the speed, efficiency and skill of all the people that handled the fire,” says Gongos. “It was a tremendous effort.”

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