Fire can be a friend and fire can be your worst enemy: Fire Expert

Cliff Buettner has spent decades, in fact, 44 years in the forestry and wildfire management industry in our province. He’s currently the Director of forestry and emergency protective services for the Prince Albert Grand Council. He’s on the Evan Bray Show to offer insight into how fires like the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire in California came about and what can be done to put them out.

EVAN BRAY: What do you make of what you see south of the border?

CLIFF BUETTNER: Fire can be a friend and fire can be your worst enemy. What three things do we need for a fire to exist? Fuel, oxygen and heat? We need some ignition source, and that will be lightning, or that will be a human-caused fire. The rate and intensity in my career has increased over time where we’re seeing more configurations like this. The wind especially will exponentially increase the rate of spread of a fire.

BRAY: Have you ever dealt with winds like the roughly 160 kilometres an hour ones California is seeing?

BUETTNER: I’ll give you an example. If you remember Fort McMurray, the fire started in Fort McMurray several years ago. The fire behaviour prediction system is based on the fire weather index. If we looked at the situation we would have had an ignition on that day. The rate of spread along the forest fringe, in standing grass was 100 meters a minute. That you can imagine a fire moving a kilometre in 10 minutes. That’s the reality.

BRAY: Have you found sometimes you’re just never a match for Mother Nature in your career?

BUETTNER: How does heat transfer? There are four ways it will transfer, conduction, convection, radiation and ember transport. Ember transport is most critical, because that’s starting fire ahead of it, and it’s the embers being spread ahead of the fire that are igniting those structures from one to another. How? Do you stop that?

BRAY: There is still only a 14 per cent containment on the fires that have been raging for a week now in California. How do you contain a fire like that?

BUETTNER: That’s the principle of fire suppression containment, and you do that either by indirect or direct attack methods. When you’re looking at the intensity of those fires, you can’t directly fight the fire. How do you stop it? Traditionally, people would use prescribed fire and you see them actively constructing a line and burning it from that line back to reduce the fuel from the heat, or the fire triangle. You have to remove the oxygen, or you have to remove the fuel somehow.

BRAY: There was a lot of criticism that we heard after the fire that happened in Jasper. Does Saskatchewan have more work to do when it comes to removing some of the dry tinder, the dead trees, those types of things, is that something that we need to be investing more in?

BUETTNER: We currently work with the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency and are actively involved in mitigation projects as we speak. Either in communities or recreational subdivisions, where we’re reducing the amount of fuel adjacent to those structures to eliminate the threat of a fire approaching it.

What we can do now with respect to any type of mitigation prior to the fire season starting up, we definitely will.

In this situation in Jasper, those were applied in Jasper. But you have to understand the intensity of that fire coming into Jasper, and the amount of fuel and how dry that fuel was. The fuel moisture content is always going to be critical, and how a fire reacts to the fuel available to it.

BRAY: In Saskatchewan, would communities closest to trees like Prince Albert be more at risk than those in the middle of the prairie, not surrounded by trees?

BUETTNER: The amount of fuel is different in a forested area compared to a stubble field. But, stubble field under the right conditions and the fuel moisture content low, with a combination of wind speed, the same effect can happen. It’s just that in a forested area, it’s more prone, or more likely. The likelihood of an evacuation or a fire approaching a community is higher.

BRAY: Is firefighting training standard enough that firefighters can be put into any fire and work collaboratively interagency-wise?

BUETTNER: Definitely, we all align ourselves with the Incident Command System. The Incident Command System dictates the operations through the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center, they have a compact border agreement through Boise, Idaho. Any national or international activities, and we’ve seen it here, where we have jurisdictions nationally and internationally, and even people from Saskatchewan have gone into Australia to assist down there. So those opportunities do exist, and that request, when it’s put out by that agency, all other agencies will respond to it as to available resources that they can send if required.

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BRAY: Your career is close to 44 years?

BUETTNER: I’m considering retirement in the next couple of months. So I’ve been doing it a long time.

BRAY: We’ve seen the Saskatchewan fire season be more risky recently are we well equipped in terms of resources?

BUETTNER: For any normal fire activity seasonally, yes. The duration and intensity of fires have increased. That’s something nationally — when all other jurisdictions exhaust their resources — when we call for other agencies to assist, they’re not available.

So it’s not only Saskatchewan, it’s other jurisdictions. We all run into the same situation, with the intensity and duration of the fire and the amount of fire that we’ve had on the landscape over time. It’s obviously increased, and there is a strain on resources at some point in time, generally, every year.