It’s now been just over one year since ‘the Beast’ forced the mass evacuation of Fort McMurray and one New Brunswicker who helped to battle the raging, devastating wildfire reflects on the experience as humbling.
Tony Cole is district supervisor for the St. George and Welsford area with the department of Energy and Resource development and went to Fort McMurray as a dozer boss, which is a person responsible for supervising a crew of bulldozers to put in a line around the fire to stop it from spreading.
“We started driving north [from Edmonton] and it was still more than an hour from Fort Mac when you could start to smell smoke, visibility got reduced and the wind was going away from us so it shouldn’t have been that way,” Cole recalls.
“As we got closer there’s fire in the median, there’s fire on both sides of the road and the poles were all burnt off and there’s cars on the side of the road.
It was very very humbling. It went from exciting to be a part of something big to, wow, this makes us feel very small.”
Cole had six bulldozers, an excavator and a nodwell — a tracked machine with a tank on the back that is able to spray water.
“We went around the edge of the fire, pushing over trees and making a trail down to bare soil that it would contain the fire,” Cole said.
“I was very close to some flames and some pretty big flames at times but I had a helicopter directly overhead working with me to knock down bigger flames so I could get by that section. It was exciting, it made your heart pound for sure.”
Tony Cole in back of vehicle travelling on seismic line to access fire
He spent 17 days out there and describes it as a learning experience and that he’s hoping down the road he gets to go somewhere else again to use his skills.
“It’s a great learning tool for us.”
