So I've been pretty busy lately because work has been insane around here...why has work been insane? Because northern Ontario is in a near-state of emergency due to an insane amount of forest fires in the area. It's been extremely hot and dry up here, with almost no rain in the past 4-5 weeks, minus some thunderstorms, which of course start many fires themselves due to lightning. Speaking with some Ontario Ministry of Natural Resource people (MNR), I guess what's also compounding this problem, is that the last 3 or 4 summers have been relatively tame in terms of fires, so a lot of dead, dry wood has built up over that time adding lots of fuel to the fire, so to speak. All of the First Nation's communities we serve are fly-in only, and many of them are in severe danger from smoke and fire, and evacuations have started at about 4 or 5 of them I think, and if things continue this way I'm not surprised if all will get evacuated soon. The Canadian Forces have been called in to help with evacuations in addition to all the small commuter airlines in the area, and out of province ground fire fighting teams were initially brought in to help, but the I'm told the conditions have become to severe to guarentee the safety of the ground crews, so the MNR has pulled all of their ground crews back. Only airborne fire attacks are going on I think. I've taken a tonne of photos over the last couple of days, and I thought some of you may be interested to see them. Wish everyone up here luck that things don't get worse, although that isnt far off! heh
First off, the MNR keeps a pretty detailed map of all the currently discovered / reported forest fires in the area, you can see the Google map of it in the following link. All the fires are organized geographically by which region they are in, and this map can give you an idea of just how many there are. Check out 'Sioux Lookout Fire 35', it is almost 100,000 hectares in size!
(all of my pics are linked from Facebook, sorry to those who can't see them)
took this one last week over a small-medium sized fire from the air
the same fire again from above
some MNR fire crews from last week, before they were pulled back from fighting. This is in Deer Lake at the airport, one of the communities that has been evacuated.
3 days ago the town I live in, Sioux Lookout, had its own day of smoke. The visibility in town was reported down to as low as 2 miles, and this pic is looking out from my roof towards the lake
this was taken 3 days ago, flying around up north, you can see the smoke rising up above the clouds
flying into the community of Sandy Lake which is starting to get pretty smoke covered!
as I said, the Canadian Forces have bee aiding in evacuations. I've seen the Herc aircraft 4 or 5 times every day bringing residents out of Sandy Lake. I'm not really sure how many people it can take in a situation like this, DE might know better, maybe like 75-100? It's still a very impressive aircraft to take that many people though, as all of these communities have gravel strips only ~3500' long.
residents getting organized for evac
this is a massive fire just to the east of Sandy Lake. This smoke / cloud is billowing up to over 12,000' feet in the air.
same fire from a bit more vertical angle
coming back into Sioux Lookout that day, the smoke thickened and the visibility dropped to almost 1.5 miles. This is looking out over the town just prior to landing.
this is the next day going into Sandy Lake, the smoke has descended and is almost covering the town. We barely we were able to land that morning due to such poor visibility. This was taken after we left, climbing out, you can't even see the town and we're probably only 2,000 or 3,000' feet at this point.
This is kind of a neat series of photos...Red Lake is a larger mining community south of where we were, and was quite clear yesterday. We happened to look down and see a CL-415 Water Bomber attacking a small fire about 30 miles north of Red Lake. You can see it 1) approaching the fire, 2) dropping its water load, and 3) pulling away, maybe going to get another pickup
later that day we were heading back up to the same area, and the smoke is growing considerably
same fire
starting our approach into Sandy Lake things looked promising, until we see this fire and smoke cloud right around the town, the airport is on the other side of the smoke, and it turned out we were unable to land due to almost no visibility. The airport was just to covered.
after leaving Sandy Lake we headed south on the west side of this cloud building from the smoke / heat below. See the video I'm going to post to get an idea of just how massive it was. This was at 12,500' in altitude.
near the end of the day yesterday, we got a message from our dispatch that we had to go into another community, Cat Lake, to pick up the last of the evacuees. About 20 miles south of the community, we ran into two large smoked-out areas downwind of the fire, it was pretty intense / scary to fly into, because the visibility dropped to zero. We could see absolutely nothing forward or downward. The cockpit also darkened considerably and the glow was a very eerie sort of orangey. Thankfully it only lasted a couple minutes
after we broke out I did get to take this cool shot hehe
we saw some flames about 10 miles south of the town. The MNR crew was telling me these are likely 200' high, even approaching 300' in some places. I didn't have time to put my zoom lens on so the pic is kinda small, but you can get an idea of how nasty the fire is.
and finally this is us dropping up the evacuees into Dryden, a city further south that is relatively free from danger for now. Cat Lake is almost entirely evacuated now, I guess only some government personnel, some residents to tend to the town are left from the ~500 residents. I think between all the communities now about 1500 people have been evacuated, and some estimates are as many as 5000 people will need to be evacuated over the next couple of days. Yikes!
Finally, this is a video I took as flew by that massive cloud about 4 pics back. It was pretty scary but awesome at the same time, as you can see the clouds billowing and churning in front of your eyes due to the extreme heat below.
19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
My inclination is to say, "Good stuff!" but of course it's not. Nice pictures, though. I've seen something like that from a commercial airliner while traveling over fires in Southern California, but not quite so up close and personal (or meaning, actually helping people). Keep 'em coming, if you can, I think we all certainly enjoy them.
_________________ This cold and dark tormented hell Is all I`ll ever know So when you get to heaven May the devil be the judge
That's insane, dude. Stay safe and thanks for sharing the pics...I grew up in the Pacific NW and fires were pretty scary things. Oh, and that orange smoky pic with the sun was beautiful.
_________________ "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth
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