Fire rages near Halifax: “Their house was already burning”

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

CLIP From the first time that firetruck came in, the first sound, within 20 minutes, that fire had spread so quickly that people were scrambling to get out of their homes and their and, and their houses were already on fire.

Jordan Heath Rawlings The first thing everyone says is that it happened so damn fast. One minute, it was the hottest day of the year in the Halifax area. Hot and dry, but not dangerous. The wildfires that were burning were elsewhere in the province, and then they weren’t. Within minutes flames were racing for suburban homes less than 30 kilometres from the downtown core. Right now, the fire still rages.

CLIP Evacuation orders are in place for several areas in the Halifax region. Firefighters are struggling to contain an out of control fire in upper Tantallon, and many homes have been engulfed by flames. The Halifax Fire chief says the fire is overpowering, crews trying to extinguish it, and is rapidly expanding by jumping roads and setting buildings on fire.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That all happened yesterday afternoon. Since then, every resource the city and the province can muster has been thrown at the fires, trying to keep it from blazing through more homes. But those resources are strained. There are, as I mentioned, still those fires elsewhere in the province, and of course firefighters from regions that aren’t burning have already been sent to Alberta and British Columbia, where a record setting start to the season is burning hundreds, thousands of hectares. So what is happening right now just outside of Halifax? How tense is the situation when the suburban homes of tens of thousands of people hinge on which way the wind blows? How rare is a fire moving this fast, this close to a major city, and how do we stop it?

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Dan Ahlstrand is the news director at City News 95.7 in Halifax right now. We’re speaking at noon on Monday. Dan, how is everything out there?

Dan Ahlstrand A tactical pause I would suggest is probably the best way to describe it. Right now the fire’s still burning, but we had a shift in the wind direction last night, so that has, brought the fire back onto itself. So, I don’t know if it’s growing at the same pace that it was before, but it’s, it’s certainly has firefighters, have given firefighters a chance to get a grip on it.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Where are you right now and, and what have you been able to see from where you are in Halifax? Because I know after talking to people out west that some of the vistas they’ve gotten were pretty scary.

Dan Ahlstrand Today it’s not as bad because of that wind shift. The smoke is blowing towards the southern tip of the province as opposed to directly over the city. But yesterday the wind was blowing directly at Halifax and when I first got into work around 4:30, 5 o’clock yesterday afternoon, so the fire had been burning for about an hour, an hour and a half. I managed to secure access to the roof of our radio station, which is in a 10 story building just on the edge of downtown Halifax. And, and to look to the, to the west, you could see this massive plume of smoke that was behind the horizon. It was eerie, you could smell it. There was ash falling from the sky onto vehicles and such. And it got to the point around five or six o’clock yesterday evening that, that I had to turn the lights on in my office because the smoke was blocking out the sun. And when you looked to see to the west when the sun was setting it was that really deep red color that is synonymous with, with forest fire smoke and it, it was really thick around here. It was pretty thick last night. I woke up this morning. And I had that feel like I’d been sitting around a campfire. That piney smokey taste in your mouth, I had that this morning and my house is, is a long way away from where the actual fire scene is. So it really created a large plume of smoke and it was just that really eerie feeling that I’ll remember. Yeah, you just had that, that sense that this is a massive event and this is going to impact a lot of people because we all knew where the fire was.

Jordan Heath Rawlings For those who aren’t familiar with Halifax, the surrounding areas, where is this fire right now?

Dan Ahlstrand The, the urban area of Halifax is, is a peninsula that sticks out into the Bedford Basin. Those that have been here will relate to Halifax being across the harbour from Dartmouth. This fire is about 30 kilometres as the crow flies directly west of the city in a, in a community called upper Tantallon. I had some friends and colleagues that live out in that area, and I’ve had conversations with them earlier today and last night, and the mood is panic. Lots of people don’t know what’s what’s in front of them. They left with the shirts on their backs. This fire took less than an hour to go from a fire call to the first set of evacuations of a, of a large subdivision in Tantallon. So people didn’t have a lot of time to get ready to get out and have had very little information since. So they don’t know if their house is standing, if their pets that they left behind are still alive. To be honest, I, I live in the, in the urban part of the city, so this fire doesn’t affect me. But just listening to the stories, it’s, it’s absolutely heartbreaking.

Jordan Heath Rawlings When did it start and what do we know about how it started and how it grew so quickly?

Dan Ahlstrand Well, it’s been really dry in Nova Scotia this year. Some suggesting the driest it’s been in many years, around 3:30 yesterday afternoon, Halifax Fire and Emergency got a call to the upper Tantallon area about a fire that had begun to spread. Now, they haven’t given us any kind of indication yet as to what the cause of the fire was, but when crews arrived, it had already spread from its original source and into the woods. And there was a number of houses right by the scene. So firefighters moved very quickly to get people away from the area. I had a conversation with a colleague who was one of the first people that was evacuated, and she said they left, and they wanted to turn around to go get their cat, and the road was already closed and the fire was already in their backyard. It moved that quickly. So it forced evacuations in two subdivisions within an hour within three or four hours. 14,000 people that live in that area were under an evacuation order, and were living with friends, are at the various comfort centers that have been set up by the municipality.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is that 14,000? The tally so far total because I understand that there have been further evacuations you know, even this morning and that it’s a very fluid situation.

Dan Ahlstrand It is a very fluid situation. The latest number that we have from the emergency management office is 14,000, but the deputy Fire chief held a news conference earlier this morning and said it is in fact a very fluid situation and they’re.Maybe more people that are evacuated. We have not received that information as of yet, so the latest best figure that I have is 14,000.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How common is this at this time of year around Halifax? Uncommon?

Dan Ahlstrand Halifax shares a lot of its space with. Mother Nature. HRM is a large municipality. It’s not just the city of Halifax and Dartmouth. HRM is, it’s almost the size of Prince Edward Island, some say and a lot of it is rural and a lot of it is, is forested. We’ve had fires in the past that have caused evacuations. There was one to the south. West of the city in a community called Herring Cove that forced about 5,000 evacuations. Then three or four years ago, we had one out in the Porters Lake area that was a more or a less densely populated area that caused some evacuations. But firefighters have said that they’ve not seen the scale of this fire and the number of evacuations and the number of structures that have been damaged or destroyed by this fire for many, many years.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is the city even prepared to fight this kind of fire? And what kind of challenges does it present, I guess, to be fighting such a fast moving fire around like residential areas?

Dan Ahlstrand Well there’s a couple of answers to that question, Jordan. The first one is that this isn’t the only fire in Nova Scotia. There’s another large fire in Shelburne County, which is near the southern tip of Nova Scotia, if you look at it on the map. So there are resources that were being used there to battle that fire and also documented stories from BC to Northwest Territories, to Alberta, to other places in the country. That are all on fire, right? So there’s a finite number of, of firefighting pieces of apparatus that are available and they’re stretched pretty thin. The second concern with this fire was in the area where it’s located there’s really only one major road that runs through the area. It’s called the Hammonds Plains Road. And it, it was a problem for some trying to get out. It was wall to wall traffic trying to get out of there when the evacuation orders were, were levied. People have been raising that concern for a number of years, anecdotally, that this is a, is a problem. It’s a bottleneck. I mentioned earlier that we’ve had an extremely dry spring. Yesterday was the hottest day of the year thus far. I think we were at 24, 25 degrees. It’s really, really dry in the region. And also we’ve had a couple of major hurricanes over the last few years. And that’s knocked a lot of trees down in the woods, and that’s just creating fuel for these things. So, right. It’s a combination of everything that created this massive fire. And allowed it to move so quickly. Yesterday, a lot of firefighters said that they’ve not seen one move this quickly, but there’s, there’s just a lot of components that are out there that, that fuel these things. And it was windy yesterday too. And as we know, wind and and forest fires kind of go hand in hand.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I know you know this already, but I was speaking with a colleague of yours out west, I don’t know, three weeks ago, and the answer was almost identical. Never seen it this hot this early. This was just the hottest day of the year, and then the wind picked up. And how do we grapple with the fact that these aren’t gonna be as rare as they might have been when we built the cities that are now threatened?

Dan Ahlstrand Lots of talk about climate change on this fire, even the firefighting brass that we’re holding news conferences we’re, we’re talking about climate change and that this may be the new reality. Not just necessarily with forced fires and with dry conditions, but the, the hurricanes that I was talking about earlier. I’ve been in Halifax now for about 15 years and for the first 13 years we didn’t have a major hurricane. We’ve had two since. And when those things come ashore, they just wreak havoc and they knock these trees down and it creates these problems. And it’s not like we can go into the woods and clean up the mess. So probably just speaking on my own opinion on this is. This may be the new reality. We may have to be dealing with these things more frequently as, as the climate changes, not only here, but right around the world.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What kind of bylaws or construction plans or anything of that sort does Halifax have in place? Again, I know when we’ve covered fires out in BC and in Alberta, you know there are houses that are built certain ways or properties built certain way. Or, you know, there are brush clearing regulations that you can’t have this stuff within 10 meters of your home or whatever. And I guess I’m wondering is how much is the infrastructure in and around the city prepared for this level of fire?

Dan Ahlstrand Well, I, I, to be honest, I don’t know if there are any burning restrictions or brush restrictions. I know that there’s a fire ban on now, but that is is kind of a rear view mirror look at that. Halifax, as I mentioned, is, is a, it’s, it’s spread out like the, the, the municipality is, is spread out over a large area. The fire deputy, fire chief this morning said it was a five alarm fire. So that means that they pretty much brought all of their apparatus and, and gear in to help fight with this. And, and the, the latest number I have is there was 30 trucks and two helicopters and a water bomber that we flew in from Newfoundland and Labrador. Because of that issue, right. That those pieces of equipment are taxed because they’re all over the place. There’s fires all over Canada and they, and they’re, you know hard to come by. We live part and parcel with Mother Nature here and, and maybe now that we’ve had this big fire and all of this, this damage and destruction because of it, maybe that is the catalyst for change when it comes to these things and maybe. Maybe we need to change the way that we, we live. It’s some, it, it’s some beautiful out there. I’ll tell you, there’s some beautiful properties. There are large lots and there’re there are lots of trees and there’s green space behind them. It’s just a wonderful place to live but there was always this, this thought in the back of people’s minds that this could happen. But now it has. And, and maybe this is, this is going to change the way that we do things here.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You mentioned it’s all hands on deck for fighting this fire. What do we know about what all hands on deck is? How many people are out there, what they’re doing? Are they successfully able to hold back the fire from further damage?

Dan Ahlstrand The Department of Natural Resources has staff on the ground. There’s 170 firefighters from Halifax municipality that are are working there. The National Defence, obviously Halifax is a large Navy town. They have their own firefighting service. They’ve been pressed into service. I’ve heard of people who are working for the fire department that were once firefighters and are now have been promoted or are in different training areas and those kind of things that are gonna be pressed into service. I’m gonna suggest this is since amalgamation of HRM, I’m gonna suggest this is probably the largest fire operation that this city’s ever seen.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What do we know about how successful it’s been in terms of injuries? Thankfully, I think as, as, at least as we are speaking, there have been no deaths. I know. Some homes have been destroyed. Do we have any sense of the scale of that?

Dan Ahlstrand No official sense of the scale, but I’m told that it’s into the thirties or even higher of numbers of houses that have been destroyed. I have no indication of how many have been damaged. There have been no fatalities or any serious injuries. Which I think I said earlier was, was the silver lining in all of this that. That you know, we managed to, to avoid any, at least to this point, anybody being seriously hurt or anybody being killed as a result. This, this isn’t a large fire. It’s large because of, it’s in a built up area. It’s 788 hectares, which on the scale of things, when we look at force fires in, in other parts of, of Nova Scotia and around the rest of the country is quite small. It’s probably too early for us to, to, to say how the effort was. I know that those firefighters are working around the clock, of course, and working 12 hour shifts on and off so that they can, they can fight these fires. My understanding is that fire fighting on force fires doesn’t happen after dark because it’s dangerous, but firefighters from HRFE last night worked around the clock just to put the fires out in the structures that were burning. So that gives you an idea of what the scale of the of the damage and the destruction from this fire is.

Jordan Heath Rawlings We’ve mentioned a couple of times how fluid the situation is, what do we know about what could still happen? If the wind is pushing back and pushing the fire back onto itself but it shifts. What are the concerns that this could still cause more damage? And that, I guess, cuz I have to ask, that it could progress further towards Halifax proper?

Dan Ahlstrand I think there’s, there’s little chance of it progressing into the urban area of Halifax at this point. The wind has switched over that it’s moving the fire to the south. The danger here is the fire burned so quickly yesterday that it didn’t consume all of the fuel that was available to it. It roared through and it didn’t burn all of the, the tinder that was there. Now it’s blowing back on itself, which, one would think would be a good thing because there would be less fuel for the fire, but there’s still lots of stuff that was untouched when the first pass went by. So the concern is, is that the fire’s gonna blow back on itself and then go back into the areas where it’s already damaged or destroyed homes and take the rest of them out. So firefighters are, are, are trying to prevent that from happening. But I can tell you it’s, it’s, it’s gusty out there. It’s 40, 45 kilometer an hour gusts.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Oh boy.

Dan Ahlstrand It might be a tall task to try and get this thing under control. They’re, they’re suggesting that this is gonna be a multiple day operation before they get fire control, before they’re able to say that they have this thing contained and those under the evacuation order have been told that they could be outta their homes for 72 hours or more. So we’re, we’re only in into 24 hours on this, and, and I think that it’s still gonna be a long way to go yet.

Jordan Heath Rawlings One of the reasons we wanted specifically to talk to you is you know, you manage a news team in a very much a breaking news world. This is very much a breaking story at the moment. The last time we spoke to you was in the aftermath of the Portapique shooting, and one of the things we spoke about then was the problems in terms of communication from the authorities to the public with obviously there was a whole inquiry around this. Does that lesson seem to have been learned? How has the communication been? What comes next? What are they saying there?

Dan Ahlstrand The evacuees will tell you and have told us that they’re receiving very little information on the state of their home. But I think that that’s standard across most of these big fires. I can tell you yesterday, I, I started covering this around four o’clock or 4:30. I received more emergency alerts through our radio station and on my cell phone than I have ever seen in, in a six hour period in my career. When the evacuation orders were coming out, the the emergency alerts were firing off. And as you know, this, that was part of the Porta inquiry was that they, they didn’t put them out onto the emergency alert, so that worked well. We’ve had pretty good access to, to the fire department to, to get information. Although the information that they’re relaying is, is a bit limited. You know, everybody wants to know what, how their house is. And they’re unable to give us that information at this point. And I had a conversation this morning with somebody who’s evacuated who said, the problem with that is, is if they don’t give us any, any information, then people will try and go and get their own and try to get back into those fire restricted areas and put themselves in danger. Or B, they’ll just start making stuff up. And that’s, that doesn’t help anybody. So the communication, if, if we were comparing this to the mass shooting, has been much better. But it can always be better and it can always be improved and, and you never really get all the information that you want at the time. But, you know, I think I can understand that the main goal of fire department right now is, is to put the fire out and then we will we’ll look to see what it did after.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Last question. And thank you for taking this much time with us, cuz I know the news alerts are coming in from all over right now. Usually I ask, you know, what comes next? I don’t think you or anybody else really knows right now. What are you watching for or waiting to hear? Like, what will this hinge on in the next 24, 48 hours?

Dan Ahlstrand Well, the weather, we’re not expected to see any significant rain in Nova Scotia until Friday.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Oh boy.

Dan Ahlstrand One of the concerns. I don’t know if a lot of people are, are thinking about now, because again, we’re only 24 hours in, but there’s a housing issue here in HRM. Our apartment vacancy rate is under 1%. And now there’s going to be multiple families that are going to not have a home. And one of the concerns I have is, where they’re gonna stay, because as we all know, even if you do have an insurance claim and you wanna rebuild and you start rebuilding, you can’t do that in 30 days, especially when there’s an event like this. So I, I think that that’s probably going to be the, the story that keeps on evolving as this, as the fire. We eventually get this fire out and we move forward is, is what happens next for those families that have been impacted by this fire and where are they gonna stay. And and that could be another story or another day.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Dan, thank you so much for this. Thank you for the work you’re doing right now to keep Halifax informed.

Dan Ahlstrand Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Dan Ahlstrand, news director at City News 95.7 in Halifax. If you are in the Halifax area, you can keep it right there for up to the minute news. That was The Big Story. For more, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can find us on social media. You can find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. You can write to us. The email address is hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can call us and leave a voicemail, 416-935-5935. Hopefully we’ll get some rain soon and we will cease to be a wildfire podcast at least for a while. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. Stay safe out there. We’ll talk tomorrow.