1 year later, Fort McMurray firefighters share pictures and stories from the front lines
After five straight days of battling the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, Jerron Hawley started to feel like it would never end.
"We were looking for a sense of like, when are we gonna be on the winning side of this fire? When are our efforts gonna to be shown?" the Fort McMurray firefighter told As It Happens host Carol Off.
"We'd set up a line to try and stop it, embers would go over our heads two streets down and start catching that on fire, and we'd have to drop everything, go back and make another line."
But he and his colleagues kept their heads down and got back to work battling the 590,000-hectare blaze — nicknamed The Beast — that destroyed 2,400 homes and buildings and forced more than 90,000 people to flee for the lives last May.
One year later, Hawley and two of his colleagues from the Fort McMurray Fire Department, Graham Hurley and Steve Sackett, have recounted their experiences in a new book, Into The Fire: The Fight to Save Fort McMurray, which hit shelves Tuesday.
The book chronicles the trio's experiences fighting the blaze in their own words, illustrated with dramatic photographs they and their colleagues took on the ground.
Looking back on those images now, Hawley says he's almost transported back to the spring of 2016.
"The fire was a couple hundred feet high at some times. You'll never forget that sound," he said. "Even if I'm sitting outside of a fire, outside of my house, you know a leisure bonfire, just the crackle from that brings out memories."
Hurley, an Afghanistan veteran who grew up in Fort McMurray, vividly remembers the moment he realized how serious the blaze really was.
He'd been putting up a fence in his yard when he decided to head over to the local Rona for some extra supplies.
"As I pulled up into the parking lot, I actually became transfixed on what I was seeing across horizon. I was seeing swaths of pressurized rolling smoke, almost like from a steam engine," he told As It Happens.
"Nobody was moving in and out of the Rona parking lot. Everyone was standing still, taking a cellphone video or just gazing at the horizon. ... I knew at that point I had to go home and get the uniform on."
Nestled between dramatic photographs of roaring flames and the charred remains of homes and cars is a simple selfie Hurley took in a gas station bathroom mirror.
He and his colleagues had stopped in for snacks when a firefighter from another department caught sight of him and became emotional.
At first, he just laughed it off. Then he saw his own reflection.
"I kind I realized I was pretty haggard looking," Hurley said. "I was breathing in a lot of different things. It's weird firefighting. You can go from boiling hot to absolutely soaking wet in a matter of seconds. It does a lot weird things to the internal regulations of your body."
Eventually, Hurley found himself in Beacon Hill, the neighbourhood where he grew up.
His father had asked him to retrieve an old Second World War photograph of Hurley's grandfather from inside their family home.
"It was just so engulfed, I never had the chance. Like so many other people," Hurley said. "Personally, that was a big low point for me."
But there were moments of joy and triumph, too. Like when they pushed back the flames on Prospect Drive and finally started to realize they might actually win this thing.
Or the moments that put into focus what really mattered — likle Hurley's girlfriend Sarah, with whom he shared a child and a home.
"There was a moment for us as a crew, kind of downtown, where we were feeling it. It was one of those moments where it was so visually overwhelming and we were so exhausted. We were starting to get a little scared," he said.
"It was in that moment for me I kind of felt like the next time I saw Sarah I needed to make this a more permanent thing."
So on his first day off, he drove straight to Calgary, knocked on the door where she was staying, and proposed.
Hawley, too, had big things happening in his personal life during the fire. He and his wife, Carlene, were expecting their first child.
"We found out about it two weeks prior, and no one else knew except for one of my best friends. So what he did is took her under the wing and evacuated her safely out of the city," Hawley said.
"So when I did get a chance to call Carlene, it was just to let her know that I was safe. I was in really, really good hands."
When it was all over, Carlene was waiting for him at his childhood home in Port Hood, N.S., along with his parents, six siblings, in-laws, cousins and golden retriever. His mother had strung up balloons on the telephone poles, like she used to do for his birthdays when he was a kid.
"The support that we had emotionally, physically, everything in this fire, was absolutely incredible," Hawley said.
A group of residents from an area of town that had been saved from the flames brought Hawley and his wife a quilt they'd made from clothing retrieved from their unscathed homes.
"When they came to the house and delivered it to me, I had to give myself a stern punch to the stomach just to hold everything in because it was pretty emotional, right? Incredible."