Helplessness and the Jasper inferno
Firefighters, residents, decision-makers — so little they could do the day a wall of flame approached town
There's a wash of emotions that surely hit the firefighters having to retreat from the wall of flame, and the Jasper residents learning by social media and rumour that their homes and businesses were lost, and Alberta's premier tearing up while waxing rhapsodically about what was lost and what will be recovered.
There's despair. Anxiety. Grief. Permeating all of it, perhaps, is something that isn't quite an emotion but can bring them all gushing to the fore:
Helplessness.
In too many western Canadian towns in recent memory — Fort McMurray and Slave Lake and Lytton — they've known how this helplessness roars into their lives.
Such is the menace of wildfire, that devastating mix of three of the four elements. Fire scarring the earth and being rushed along by the wind, but without enough water to slow its carnage.
Parks Canada had spent years trying to minimize the risk in the woods surrounding Jasper.
Unlike the B.C. and Alberta towns mentioned above, where fire raced in before defenders could properly respond, wildfire crews had fought for days against the inferno that was threatening the town of Jasper from the south.
On Wednesday evening, much of that resistance force had to pull back for their own safety, retreating from nature's fury as it raced forward.
Mike Ellis, Alberta's minister of public safety and emergency services, brought some perspective on why no person or machine could ultimately stop this fire.
It had moved five kilometres in less than 30 minutes, he said. The flames were 100 metres high.
"Any firefighter will tell you there's little to nothing you can do when you have a wall of flames coming in like that," Ellis told reporters.
Retreat tends to be the last thing firefighters want to do. They'll often stay and fight right up to the point that continuing to do so would put their lives in danger, and often beyond that point, only to face grim consequences afterward.
"This decision has not been made lightly," the incident commanders for Parks Canada and the Municipality of Jasper said in a joint statement on Wednesday, shortly before flames reached the town.
"First responders dedicate their lives to the protection of people and communities. Given the intensity of fire behaviour being observed the decision has been made to limit the number of responders exposed to this risk."
These command centres exist to prevent the worst from happening. By Wednesday evening, the best they could do was fight to minimize the destruction of a Rocky Mountain jewel of town — save some structures as others were engulfed, protect the key infrastructure like the hospital and sewage treatment plant, which would be needed to service the parts of Jasper that remained.
Richard Ireland has been Jasper's mayor for 23 years, the only one it's had since the townsite became its own municipality within a federal park. When flames breached his community, he was 500 kilometres away near Crossfield, Alta., on evacuation order like all his fellow residents.
"Like all residents, I feel essentially devastated, shattered and absolutely helpless in the face of nature, which is just so powerful," he told The National.
When the evacuation order came around 10 p.m. Monday, fire along multiple highways cut off Jasperites from the rest of Alberta. They were instructed instead to flee into British Columbia.
Two nights later in Valemount, the first town across the provincial boundary, evacuees were glued to their phones as their town burned, seeking word of what the flames had taken.
They shared facts and photos as they came in, the Globe and Mail's Nancy MacDonald reported.
A gas station blown up. A hotel burned to the ground. A coffeehouse aflame. They shared hugs, too.
Karyn Decore, whose family has owned the Maligne Lodge for six decades, was out for dinner on a Caribbean vacation when someone texted her a photo of flames devouring the hotel. Her staff had been evacuated for two days by that point and unable to do anything about the destruction.
A sense of helplessness may have also spread across Jasperites with the lack of information about the fate of their homes or businesses.
The town and Parks Canada have been reluctant to share information about the damage's extent while crews still fight fires in town and try to nail down the precise structural toll. Parks Canada has even pushed back against the details or indicators others have put out, including Premier Danielle Smith's remark there was "potentially 30 to 50 per cent structural damage" in Jasper.
So residents must wait, hundreds of kilometres away, to find out whether they have a home to return to. Will another firefighting crew's phone video leak out, and will they recognize their remaining chimney or concrete stairs that now lead to a front door and living room that no longer exist?
The premier got weepy as she spoke about the place Jasper holds in so many Albertans' hearts, as a visitors' paradise in winter. The province has suffered deep losses in towns before — but not in one housed in a UNESCO World Heritage site.
"We will recover from this," Smith said. "The magic is not lost and it never will be."
The lack of control over this terrible outcome appears to have hit the provincial government in a different way. Dry summer after dry summer has given Alberta much experience in fighting windswept wildfires, supporting evacuees by the thousand, and recovering after mass destruction.
But the Jasper inferno was different, and it seemed frustratingly so. It's in Alberta's boundaries, but in a national park, so Parks Canada and the municipality were the lead fighters, not the province's team. That meant Alberta needed to be invited to deploy its firebreak-creating bulldozer and night-vision surveillance helicopter.
The night-chopper request came Wednesday, an Alberta official told a briefing, but by then the fire weather made it too dangerous to fly over the flames.
Smith said she'd request on Thursday that the provincial government join incident command in Jasper National Park. In the post-mortems of this disaster that will come months or years from now, the federal-provincial responsibility tangle may well get reconsidered.
Readers and advocates will note that people aren't fully helpless in the face of ever-worsening wildfire seasons. Society can act to fight the climate change that creates the drier conditions and hotter weather that makes fires more extreme.
While this is true, it also holds true that no amount of carbon emission cuts can abruptly curb what has become a near-perennial summer threat to forests and communities — though better managing wildfire response can be a factor.
An aggressive fight against climate change may prevent things from becoming more dire in years to come, but such is the pace of climate change that this won't rescue towns out of an inferno's path this year or next.
And, no doubt, more helplessness lies ahead in the fire's aftermath — when those recovering actually look for and expect help. The residents of Jasper, and those who cherish visits, will now await recovery and rebuilding, and the insurance companies and government relief programs that provide that assistance.
Judging from experiences in Lytton and other post-disaster towns, senses of futility and impatience may creep into the next phase, too.
For well over a century, people have come to Jasper — and settled — to feel a different, more pleasant sense of helplessness in the face of nature's might.
The awe of its natural beauty, the breathtaking mountains and opaline lakes. Soon, one hopes, we can return to them, and that sense that we are small against a majestic force.
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