Earlier this summer, a wildfire crept – and then sprinted – towards Fox Creek, a community of fewer than 2,000 in north-west Alberta. At one point, the crackling wall of flames and thick black smoke moved more than 30 miles in a single day, prompting frantic evacuations from the town.
“It was terrifying,” said Angela Martineau, a paramedic who lives in the community. “I was told it was going to be on my doorstep at this time, then at this time… [There were] a lot of anxieties and emotions for those first six days”.
But unlike other locals who threw belongings into suitcases and fled, Martineau and her husband Wade stayed on to face down the blaze as volunteer firefighters, determined to help save their community.
Canada’s record-breaking wildfires have forced more than 120,000 people from their homes and burned through more than 10m hectares (24.7m acres) – a 1,100% increase over the 10-year average. Smoke from the fires has drifted thousands of miles to choke cities across North America.
For crews on the frontline, the struggle to contain aggressive boreal fires has left teams physically and emotionally exhausted. In recent days, morale has taken a further hit after two wildfire fighters were killed while combating blazes.
In Canada, a shortage of firefighters has further exacerbated a challenging wildfire season. Volunteers make up about 70% of the country’s firefighting crews, playing a central role as first responders in rural settings. But they are also grappling with a growing crisis of physical and mental exhaustion. And as their roles become more vital in a hotter, more fire-prone country, crew leaders worry their teams are nearing a breaking point.
When fire threatened Fox Creek in May, local crews worked past the point of exhaustion, at times putting in shifts longer than 24 hours.
Some relief came when the province’s well-resourced forestry units arrived. But Alberta officials soon concluded the community couldn’t be saved and ordered those fire crews to pull out.
The Fox Creek volunteers refused to leave their home, instead digging, shoveling and chopping fire guards into the landscape as the blaze advanced to less than a mile of the town boundary.
“Alberta forestry did not want us to stay. They said … this town [was] going to be consumed by fire and we flat out refused to leave,” said Wade. “With all the resources we had here, with all the experience, we felt the town was defendable – we felt we had a good plan in place.”
And they were right: the fire never crossed into Fox Creek.
But the success came at a steep cost: the volunteers were shattered physically and emotionally. The Martineaus didn’t see their youngest son for nearly three weeks.
Stretched provincial and municipal budgets have made equipping, training and staffing volunteer departments increasingly difficult. A changing climate is producing hotter and faster fires while rural depopulation means there are fewer volunteers. In 2016, 126,000 volunteers were serving as firefighters, but that figure fell to 90,000 last year.
All of this has piled pressure on frontline crews, for whom mental health concerns can be intense and sometimes deadly. In 2018 alone, the fire department in Grand Cache – a village 3 hours west of Fox Creek – sent representatives to the funerals of six firefighters; all six had taken their own lives.
“You keep seeing the worst day of a person’s life,” said Bryon Redknap, a volunteer firefighter in Grand Cache. “It gets heavy.”
Redknap said that the record-breaking fire season had also given him deeper insight into his own family: his father is also a volunteer firefighter and for years suffered from fluctuating moods and increased irritability after distressing calls.
Redknap has become a mental health advocate in his department, actively seeking additional training and support.
One inescapable reality is that a volunteer firefighter’s “second life” on the frontline is a separate, full-time career, says Brian Cornforth, fire chief in Parkland county, just west of Alberta’s capital, Edmonton.
“High-intensity wildfires have put a tremendous amount of strain physically and mentally on people,” said Cornforth, who oversees county firefighters attending to more than 1,000 incidents a year.
On a recent summer afternoon, three members of the Parkland volunteer fire department rattled along a gravel road through a forest near the town of Entwistle, which had only recently been ablaze. They were scanning the charred stands of pine for hotspots, or smoldering patches which could potentially break out again.
The fire had begun small but the hot and windy conditions made containing it near impossible. In the first week alone, the crew put in nearly 100 hours attempting to extinguish the blaze. The long and erratic hours quickly wore people down.
As the exhaustion mounts, fatigue can fuel dejection and eventually despair. “It’s like you’re fighting a losing battle,” said firefighter Kyle Sherman.
A decade ago, volunteer firefighters often spent nearly two decades serving their communities. Today, departments say that number is down to only five years, largely because of burnout among volunteers.
To make matters worse, departments across the country say they are struggling to meet recruitment targets. The crisis is magnified in rural communities, where dwindling work opportunities and an exodus to larger centers has left a smaller and ageing population.
Some local departments now have started offering paid training and perks such as family events, gas cards and tax incentives in an attempt to attract new volunteers.
Departments have also invested in recruitment drives, Facebook ads and even stopping strangers at the local bank or post office to recruit members, which has actually been successful for more than one department.
But Cornforth worries such attempts are an interim solution and that a national strategy is needed to ensure the survival of robust, well-trained and equipped rural departments.
This year’s fires have made clear the toll on fire crews.
During a recent wildfire, Cornforth’s team broke down after flames broke through a fire guard. “They were on the ground, crying from physical and emotional exhaustion because they’ve been fighting a wildfire for 17 hours straight … they could not express any other emotion other than tears.”
For Cornforth, it was a devastating snapshot of an unsustainable situation.
“As I turned away from them, I had tears in my eyes. It wasn’t a good day and I’ve had some shitty days in my career,” he said. “We can keep pretending we are healthy, but we got a real sickness.”
