In 40 years of wildland firefighting, Mike Morrow had seen pretty much everything including – if rarely – fires like the monster below him. Watching out the open door of a helicopter, he stared down as it ate up kilometer after kilometer of boreal forest.
The Donnie Creek wildfire is the largest in British Columbia history. At more than 583,000 hectares (1.4m acres), it is larger than the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. It could swallow nine areas the size of New York City without blinking, but it wasn’t the fire’s size that worried Morrow – it was its behaviour.
“I looked at it and went, ‘Well, there’s no way we’re winning this one,’” he said.
Canada is in the middle of its worst wildfire season in recorded history, with more than 13m hectares (32m acres) burned from 5,440 blazes since January. As of early August, the bulk of the country’s active fires were concentrated in the westernmost province.
Circling hundreds of feet above, Morrow wasn’t just gawking. Drawing on his decades of experience, he was planning to do what some people might assume to be counterintuitive: he was working out how to make the fire even bigger.
Riding in the seat in front of him above the Donnie Creek blaze was ignitions trainee Morgan Boghean. As Morrow’s mind whirred with calculations about relative humidity, temperature, fuel type and wind speed, Boghean’s whirred along in parallel, hoping he was arriving at the same conclusions.
After four decades in the BC wildfire service’s iconic fire-resistant red shirts and blue pants, Morrow is retiring. This – the worst fire season in Canada’s history – will be his last, and Boghean has until November to learn as much as he can from his mentor.
Morrow is a senior fire behaviour and ignitions specialist. It’s his job to map fires, to learn their quirks and personalities, and figure out how to contain them. That often means using planned ignitions to set sections of forest alight on purpose, consuming fuels inside containment lines to prevent a fire from spreading uncontrollably.
Sometimes that means dragging flaming drip torches through the underbrush by hand. Other times it means flying over the fire with a heli-torch – a giant barrel slung under a helicopter and dripping flaming napalm-like jelly directly on to the treetops.
Think of it as strategically denying resources to the enemy.
“Firefighting is a chess game with Mother Nature,” said Morrow. For the Donnie Creek fire, for example, steering it away from important sites such as highways often meant adding significantly to the fire’s size. Its extremely remote location also provided an excellent opportunity for training and practicing aerial ignitions, he said.
For Boghean, the experience was a world-class lesson in fighting the kind of big fires that Canada and the rest of the world are starting to see more of – thanks in part to the climate crisis.
“It was about three years ago when Mike asked if I wanted to spend his last two years with him [as a trainee], and I jumped at the chance,” Boghean said. “My wife wasn’t too happy. We’d just had a kid, and I had plans to sort of start taking it easy a bit, but with Mike, there’s not very many people in our organization with his level of knowledge, so I just couldn’t pass it up.”
Morrow’s departure is looming just as the BC wildfire service is being tested like almost never before. The four worst fire seasons on record have all occurred in the past seven years. Fires are exhibiting behaviour that can widen the eyes of even seasoned veterans with 20 years under their belts.
Boghean is one of them.
“When I first started, a 2,000-hectare [5,000-acre] fire was a big fire,” Boghean said. “Then in 2014, I remember there was a 100,000-hectare [247,000-acre] fire near Burns Lake, and it was like, ‘Wow, 100,000 hectares. That’s a big fire.’
“Now today, the Donnie Creek fire was close to 600,000 [hectares], and you have a year where there are multiple fires across the province that are over 2,000 [hectares],” Boghean said.
Meanwhile, like many fire services in North America, the BC wildfire service is facing struggles with firefighter retention and resources stretched thin. This year saw the lowest number of new recruit applicants in close to a decade, and some crews have seen turnover approaching 50%. Hundreds of firefighters from the US, Mexico, Australia, South Africa and Brazil have been called in to help.
The challenges are not unique to Canada’s west. Firefighters in Ontario are fighting for better pay they say is necessary to keep good people from leaving. In the US, federal wildland firefighters are pushing for the implementation of the Tim Hart Act, which would boost their starting pay to $20 an hour, as well as provide better healthcare benefits for permanent and temporary firefighters.
The BC wildfire service acknowledged the turnover challenges it’s facing, and said it is working to address them by making the fire service a more attractive long-term employer.
“As our fire seasons get longer and we expand our capacity for year-round multi-hazard response, our recruitment, training, learning and development is being modernized to forge wildfire career paths with our goal to increase our capacity and retention,” it said in a statement.
Then there’s exhaustion: in mid-July, for example, one BC wildfire crew was already into its fourth deployment of the season, and expecting to see seven or eight before the summer is out. At the same time last year the crew was only on its first deployment.
After four wildfire line-of-duty deaths in a month across western Canada, including two in BC, many firefighters say privately that they’re rattled, with the worst of BC’s wildfire season – typically mid-August – still ahead of them.
To help address these pressures, the BC wildfire service has created support programs that essentially treat fire crew members as high performance athletes, rather than basic manual labourers. The agency has hired athletic therapists to work in fire camps and offer sometimes daily massage and physical therapy. It also offers mental health support for firefighters who are struggling.
But as the climate crisis continues to make wildfire seasons longer and fire behaviour more extreme, the knowledge transfer from veterans like Morrow to the younger ranks is vitally important if the service is to prepare for what’s coming.
“He’s been a great mentor,” Boghean said. “Having the ability to pass on his knowledge, that doesn’t happen for a lot of people to pass on everything they’ve learned and get to close the chapter.”
Earlier this summer, on a fire complex outside Vanderhoof, BC, Morrow and Boghean were hunched over their computers, examining maps and weather reports, planning their next burns on a series of fires across north-central BC.
Asked what he thinks is the biggest challenge facing wildland firefighters in the coming decades, Morrow pauses.
“I think people don’t like fire,” he said. “They don’t want to understand it, they just want it all to stop. And they want no smoke in the province at all. And they don’t understand that’s not achievable.”
Instead, he said, Canada needs to relearn how to live with fire, how to fire-smart homes and protect its communities.
Morrow spent the twilight years of his career as a champion for bringing prescribed, preventive fire back to landscapes that evolved to rely on it.
While there is still plenty of BC’s wildfire season left to go, Boghean is already thinking about what it will be like once Morrow hangs up his flight helmet for good.
“Oh definitely, I’m going to miss him,” Boghean said. “But I think he’s ready.”
The departure will be bittersweet for Morrow as well.
“I’ll miss just the awesome beauty of wildfire itself,” Morrow said. “You know how something so colorful and pretty and fascinating can be so destructive when it has a bad day.”
