Today, Canadian Press reporter Michael Tutton took part in a media pool visit of Halifax neighbourhoods damaged by recent wildfires, organized by municipal officials. Below are his notes from the visit.
The municipal fire department provided a media tour of some of the most severely burned areas of the Halifax wildfire on Tuesday afternoon, referred to officially as the “most affected areas.”
On Carmel Crescent in the Highland Park neighbourhood, birds were singing loudly on trees with green foliage that remained amid the blackened woodlands.
A few scorched music sheets drifted in a watery ditch alongside the road, along with pages from a 1987 yearbook.
A wheelbarrow filled with blackened plants, with a shovel leaning on it, sat in the yard of a burned residence. It appeared the arms of the wheelbarrow had been dropped to the ground as someone departed rapidly.
David Meldrum, the deputy fire chief of the Halifax regional municipality, said the fire had started about three kilometres to the west on Juneberry Lane, in the Westwood subdivision, and had moved east to the neighbourhood where he was standing, making its final journey up a steep hill to destroy all but a few homes on the crescent.
“This area…the fire moved very quickly through this neighbourhood and severely damaged many of the properties here. It’s very tragic,” he said.
He noted that around him some homes burned while others remained intact, explaining that the flames path varied depending on small changes in topography and wind.
“It’s important to understand that as this wildfire moved … it threw embers up into the air which landed hundreds of metres in front of the flames… and would ignite objects in yards, around homes and on the back decks. They were small fires when they started, but they can grow rapidly.”
The tour traveled to Yankeetown Road, where RCMP officers were still controlling access, into an area where in some locations a numbers of homes were intact, and nearby there would be piles of burned rubble.
RCMP Cpl. Guillaume Tremblay had been providing media commentary all week, but it was his first visit to the area. “It’s devastating and it’s going to be heartbreaking for people coming back,” he said.
In the Yankeetown Road area, the damage was more interspersed than on Carmel Crescent.
At the third stop, on Bonsai Road, also in the Yankeetown neighbourhood, Meldrum pointed out a fire break about five metres wide cut by bulldozers brought in by the provincial Department of Natural Resources.
The fire had spread into the area through Sunday and was held at this location by provincial and municipal firefighters.
“Had the fire progressed beyond this point certainly we had properties in the (nearby) Pockwock Road area and into (the suburb of) Bedford that were at risk,” said Meldrum.
“There’s still work going on here. Part of the strategy to control the fire was to bring in a large volume of heavy equipment and scrape away the soil,” he said.
Adrian Sweet, a municipal firefighter, was on the street checking propane tanks at burned properties.
He and firefighters from Station 55 had been at the fire since it began on May 28, with only a few breaks.
“I was on duty…when the call came in for what was initially a grass fire,” he said. Asked what kept him going, he responded: “It’s my community. … We’re a tight knit crew at Station 55. We’re able to lean on one another since this event started.”