In ‘Wildfire,’ A Brave Portrait of Human Strength

It’s not often that I cry at work, but it happened while watching Wildfire, Knowledge Network’s new five-part series on the fight to save B.C. forests across the province. The 2023 death of Devyn Gale, a 19-year-old firefighter from Revelstoke, made explicit the dangers involved in fighting wildfires.

In the middle of watching the Wildfire episode dedicated to Gale’s life and work, I tucked my head so no one in the office could see the tears running down my face.

Gale’s story is a reminder that the human cost of fighting wildfires has expanded alongside the growing size and destructive power of the fires themselves.

Wildfire is a remarkable undertaking. Director Kevin Eastwood, along with co-directors Simon Shave and Clayton Mitchell, have created an epic yet deeply grounded documentary production that places audiences directly on the fire line, so close that you can almost feel the heat on your face.

As Vancouver-based Eastwood explains on the phone, the idea for the series had been pitched a few times before, but BC Wildfire Service had always put the kibosh on the idea, maintaining that anyone who wanted to film active firefighting needed to be trained. Enter Shave and Mitchell, two former firefighters who pitched Eastwood just as he was wrapping up production on British Columbia: An Untold History, his series on the history of the province.

Serendipity has a way of playing a role when the time is right. With Shave and Mitchell’s support, the universe aligned and Wildfire came together.

In the first episode of the series, Dan, an air attack officer with the BC Wildfire Service, recounts how the fire season of 2003 was unprecedented. But that season was followed by new, unprecedented records set in the wildfire seasons of 2009, 2015, 2018 and finally 2023, when the province faced catastrophic conditions.

As he says, we might need a word other than “unprecedented” to describe what could happen in the next five years.

The first episode, titled “This is Personal,” begins with interviews with residents of Lytton, B.C. who witnessed their town burn to the ground on June 30, 2021.

Tiffany, a woman whose family lived in the centre of town, explains that Lytton residents were lucky; if the fire had happened at night instead of during the day, many more people would have died.

Even so, the speed and scale of the blaze took people by surprise. Tiffany had just returned home with her young son when she smelled what she thought was at first a campfire. When she looked out her front door, the buildings only a few blocks from her house were fully engulfed.

The Lytton fire destroyed 90 per cent of the town, but that was only the beginning. As residents were housed in hotels in nearby communities, the lingering toxic effects of the wildfire meant that people could only visit the town if they were wearing full protective gear.

The scale of loss was astronomical, but amongst the wholesale destruction, remarkable stories of survival took place, like an elderly woman’s cat, who managed to make it through the blaze despite being severely burned.

Alternating between the Lytton fire and more recent fire seasons in the West Kootenays, Wildfire draws connections between catastrophic conditions and how to better combat them before they spiral out of control.

If it feels like a wartime footing, that is intentional. The terminology used, effective and terse, is akin to the language of active combat: “Initial Attack, Parattack, Rapattack, Air Attack.”

It’s a war waged on multiple fronts by battalions of specialized personnel with on-the-job training and expertise gleaned in the heat of the action.

Stunning feats of human strength

In Nelson, B.C., the Initial Attack, or IA, crew is led by one the toughest women I’ve seen. When IA leader Chloe gets an initial phone report about fire near the town, she hops on her motorbike and takes off like a bat out of hell.

As she explains to the camera, one of the first steps of stopping a fire is to find the closest water source. If none exists, then it’s a “bladder show,” which means helicoptering in what resembles an overgrown kiddie pool and bucketing water in from whatever lake or river is closest.

Enter Razor Ray, the pilot of a medium bucket ship. Ray explains the delicate art of dangling an enormous bag of water on a long line beneath his helicopter to bring water to the IA crew on the ground. As Chloe states, it is the most expensive way to fight a fire, but sometimes it is also the only option available.

Here is where a series of perceptual shifts come into play, with a vertigo-inducing overhead shot of the bucket taken from the open door of the aircraft. It’s an effective way of illustrating the technical aspects of fighting fire. Human labour meets technology, all supported by experience and expertise.

Some of the most amazing people in the series are the women who work for the BC Wildfire Service: practical, committed and brave as hell. We see them as part of a team of smokejumpers, leaping out of helicopters into active fire zones. They are also fire spotters, whose job it is to patrol in a small plane, looking for wisps of smoke that indicate a blaze has just started.

As Eastwood explains, the largely female crew of smokejumpers is partly related to weight; women tend to be smaller and lighter than men. While women don’t necessarily have the same physical strength as their male counterparts, the job requires endurance and fortitude, qualities that women have long excelled in.

Staff at fire centres like Southeast Fire Centre in Castlegar, B.C. organize the platoons of first responders. In an online meeting one morning in the show, fire centres across the province meet to assess fires of interest.

As a first line of defence, the initial attack crew is supported with technologies including drone pilots, which use thermal imaging at night to look for hot spots, feeding that information to the people on the ground.

The documentary spends intentional time on the technical aspects of fighting wildfire — this provides a deeper, more extensive understanding of what the work entails and, in so doing, offers viewers a profound appreciation of the level of courage and commitment required of its workers.

A ‘tight-knit family’

Amidst the vertiginous heights and stunning vistas of mountain ranges, the smaller details in Wildfire embed deepest.

As the crews pitch their tents and camp overnight to be on the scene at first light, Callum, a member of the West Kootenays IA group says, “Every time I think about not coming back, I think about my friends, and it’s a pretty tight-knit family. Honestly, I can’t imagine not working in that environment.”

Spanning the province from Kelowna to the West Kootenays to Gun Lake, Wildfire captures the fullest picture of the ongoing campaign to not only fight active blazes, but also mitigate and plan for the future.

Part of this work involves returning to Indigenous knowledge systems and controlled burns.

The series is set against the backdrop of a greater spectre of climate change. Hotter, drier summers have created conditions that lead to fires so large and voracious that conventional means of suppression don’t work anymore.

As cities like Kelowna have grown rapidly, development has placed people in the direct line of fire. The fourth episode in the series tracks fire crews as they battle the 2023 blaze that destroyed homes in Kelowna.

Many of the first responders lost their own houses, including the local fire chief. Even as crews were fighting the inferno through the night, the chief notes that no one left their jobs to look out for their own homes.

This level of devastation is an increasingly common experience shared by people across British Columbia. Lytton may have been one of the first towns to face destruction, but it will not likely be the last. As Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman says, “People were running for their lives.”

Gordon, a resident of the town, puts it even more bluntly. “We’re the canary in the coalmine. We had the heat and the chaos, but it’s coming for everybody,” he says.

“We weren’t prepared and I don’t believe that society is prepared in the same kind of way, so we have to, as a society, work together to make changes now, because as we discovered if you are scrambling at the last minute, you leave people behind.”

Wildfire is an extraordinary achievement, not only in the stories captured and the technologies employed, but more importantly in pulling together the bigger picture. As climate change looms large, the work of fighting the fires is part of a war for the planet.

The people on the front line, brave, resolute and committed, are a powerful reminder that humans are capable of remarkable things when we work together.

‘Wildfire’ is free to watch on Knowledge Network. New episodes are released every week until May 20.