Photos by Kevin Hastings

What the Blazes?

Like it or not, the big story for July was either the fires on the national reaction to the fires. On the one hand we had a stellar job of getting ready for just about anything, lead by Jon Mitchell and representatives from about two dozen agencies. The contingency plan certainly did include a potential evacuation, but we never got around to declaring one.

One the other hand, out major emergency turned out to be the way the national coverage of our little crisis dampened our tourist season just when it looked like were were going to have the best one since “9/11” put the fear of Osama into the travelling public. For more on this, read on.

Dawson Rumour Mill Gets a Reality Check

by Dan Davidson

Interest in the emergency measures planning seems to be climbing as the situation stretches out in duration. The July 14 public meeting had about 55 people in the audience, twice as many as the first one on July 7, not to mention the many people who would have been watching at home on cable 11.

EMO coordinator John “Mitch” Mitchell addressed the issue of rising community concerns in his part of the talk. The first task of the EMO group has been to plan for the worst case that might befall the town core of Dawson. Once a plan has been developed to deal with that, scenarios for lesser impacts, including the possibility that the fires might never get nearer than 15 kilometres, began to be considered.

Mitch felt that perhaps the worst case planning emphasis has given people the wrong idea about what the committee has been doing. While there is no evacuation order in effect for the town, the possibility that Trustee Ray Hayes might have to issue such an order is one of the scenarios that has been looked at.

“The only thing that’s worse than a natural disaster is not planning for it,” Mitch told his audience.

“Anybody here wants us to stop planning, put up your hand,” he said. No one did, but the laughter was immediate.

“Okay, you’ve just made history,” Mitch said. “In thirty years of public meetings this is the only one where everyone’s agreed ...”

Mitch indicated that a number of plans were in place, and that he wasn’t prepared to give details on any of them, beyond the most general outlines. The situation in Dawson is not static, and plan details issued in advance would probably be wrong or modified by the time they needed to be used, should that happen. A handout to residents listed a number of things that could be done to assist in the event of an evacuation, and a list of nine things that could be done to stay prepared. There was also a checklist for assembling an emergency supply kit in the event of a need to travel.

More specific details will be issued by poster, public meeting, television and radio announcement and the rolling ads on cable 11 should the need arise.

But each of the speakers at the meeting emphasized the constant message that this was contingency planning under discussion.

“There is no immediate threat to the City of Dawson from the fire activity,” said Matt Meyers, the Incident Commander for the Goldfields Complex.

David Milne, YTG’s fire behavior specialist, outlined the worst case scenario for a fare advancing on Dawson. As things stand it would move at a rate of four km daily, giving lots of time for movement.

The town would not be facing a wall of advancing flames, but would rather be in danger from embers flung into the air by the convection currents from the fire. There has been ash from the fires on a number of days over the last couple of weeks.

In such a case, the “town is very defensible”, at last in part due to the fact that so many of its wooden buildings have metal roofs. Additionally, the Klondike River and some very poor burning areas lie between the French Gulch fire and the town.

Of course, said Milne, if it came to that, Wildfire Management would be throwing everything they had at the advancing fire to slow it down.

It is important to understand that fires the size of those in the complex are not extinguished unless by Mother Nature. Humans can really only manage to minimize the harm they might cause.

Wildfire Management, said Meyer, aims to ensure public safety, maintain the integrity of communities and highway corridors and protect homes and buildings. So far, he said, all these objectives have been met on a daily basis. Even though there have been road closures, they have been intermittent.

“There are no free burning fires in the complex at this time,” Meyers told the audience.

All of them have been diverted, redirected, held back by a combination of cat lines, aerial bombardment, back-burning actions and values protection operations. This does not mean they haven’t grown. With the Haystack fire at 90,000 hectares, Dominion at 23,449, Dempster at 12,991 and French Gulch at 4,200, there has certainly been growth, but it’s been growth that hasn’t moved in the direction of Dawson, by and large.

Milne and Mitchell indicated that air quality would be one of the biggest reasons to get people out of town, but another would be to get them out of the way, so that if the worst case “fortress Dawson” scenario were to occur, firefighters could deal with the flare ups within the town more effectively.