Conditions Perfect For Test Blaze, But Researcher Not Sure What Went Wrong

Conditions Perfect For Test Blaze, But Researcher Not Sure What Went Wrong
May 15, 2007

Ontario - Conditions couldn't have been more perfect in northeastern Ontario for a forest fire - and that's exactly how Tim Lynham wanted it. Lynham, a forest fire research officer with the Canadian Forest Service, waited more than a year for the perfect weather to set a test blaze in the hopes of better understanding forest fires. He and his colleagues even had a 100-page plan detailing how the prescribed burn would take place.

"Last year we were going to try it, but the weather conditions were too extreme and then they were too wet, so last year was not an option," Lynham said.

On Sunday, with all their instruments in place, the temperature nearing 20 degrees Celsius, the relative humidity at 22 per cent and the wind at a perfect 9.5 km an hour, the fire was set.

A few hours later, the researcher's perfect day turned into a nightmare.

The fire, which was supposed to stay at two hectares in size, began spotting.

"That's when embers are carried up by the fire and deposited in front of the fire starting new fires," Lynham explained. "And that was the problem we ran into, there were too many little fires."

By late Monday night, the fire, located 100 kilometres northeast of Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., had grown to 1,500 hectares.

"The disappointment is we had a plan, we stuck to the plan, we had the best people. We thought we had the right conditions and it was going to be OK," said Lynham.

"We knew there was a risk factor, but we thought it was very, very small. Then something happened that we couldn't predict."

It's the first time a research fire has spread in the 25 years that such burns have been set, said Barry Radford, a spokesperson with Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources.

What the fire shares in common with others is the amount of manpower needed to fight it, and the amount of money it will cost.

Radford said 16 fire ranger crews of three people each were fighting the fire, known as Sault No. 13.

In addition to that, there's an incident management team in place and a values protection unit - teams of people sent out to use sprinkler systems to water down structures in the fire's path.

The protection unit's work helped save a store and a complex with a restaurant and store.

There are also four helicopters working the blaze.

In 2006, a relatively quiet forest fire season in Ontario, government figures show that fire suppression efforts cost $141.5 million.

Officials were optimistic about being able to bring the blaze under control after rain fell in the region Monday. As of late Tuesday afternoon, the forest fire hazard rating in Sault Ste. Marie was listed as medium.

The accident won't stop researchers from setting fires again.

"We're trying to do this so we can make better predictive models so that when these things happen naturally, we have better information for the people who need to fight them," Lynham said.

"We got lots of good information from this fire... immensely useful... information that we normally wouldn't get off a wildfire because we had instruments, we had video cameras all over the place."

Written by Canadian Press