With the wildfires still burning, the province has seen enormous support from residents as well as other provinces. Communities have been offering food and clothing donations, accommodations, and volunteering their own firefighters.
In Humboldt, the Humboldt & District Chamber of Commerce put out a message on Facebook requesting item donations and offering campsites to evacuees. The message itself reached more than 18,000 people within a couple days and in the week since the request was put out, they’ve had donations pouring in.
“We started to do something about this on Saturday (July 4) when the fire hit La Ronge and that community was evacuated,” said Debra Nyczai, executive director for the Humboldt Chamber of Commerce. “There was close to 8,000 people having to leave. So because … thousands and thousands of people were already being displaced, we thought we should do something to help.”
The old train caboose at the chamber’s campgrounds is filled with items such as clothing, dental products, toys, and other miscellaneous things. They’ve got a few evacuee families staying at the campgrounds, but they’ve got more donations than is needed.
“If they’re not all used for evacuees that are staying here, I’ll make sure they get to one of the bigger centres. The Red Cross officially has Prince Albert, Saskatoon, and Regina as evacuation centres,” said Nyczai. “Obviously, what we’re up against is finding a big enough vehicle. We’ll probably need an enclosed truck to take that stuff, so if anybody’s willing to help, we’d appreciate it.”
According to Nyczai, there were many other groups and businesses in the community that stepped forward:
• The Community Gathering Place offered space to store donations
• Humboldt Smiles Dental Studios Inc. donated dental supplies. One of their staff members has also been volunteering her time after hours
• Caleb Village donated some food to a family that has taken in 10 evacuees
• The Humboldt Community Soup Kitchen cooked extra meals for the evacuees.
• The Bella Vista Inn has been offering accommodations and collecting donations
• Sobeys has donated supplies
• City Taxi has offered free rides to evacuees anywhere in the community
• PARTNERS Family Services has donated supplies as well as offered outreach counseling if anyone needs
“We’re pretty set right now. We were just trying to prepare as a just-in-case when it was going on, because you never know,” said Nyczai. “I’d rather be prepared than not. So we can take people here, if not we can get the stuff to where people need, so at this point I think we’ve got sufficient donations.”
According to Nyczai, she’s been hearing that evacuees in the larger centres need certain unused items such as underwear, socks, and bras for women. The Saskatchewan government is asking that if anybody wants to offer support, to direct their donations to local shelters in Regina, Saskatoon, and Prince Albert since they’ll be able to make the best use of it. The government is currently not equipped to handle monetary donations.
In terms of volunteer firefighting efforts, provincial government put out a call for 250 firefighters and labourers last week. They got a response numbering over 600 in submitted names. The Humboldt Fire Department has already sent two groups of volunteers to help out in La Ronge and a third group made its way there on Monday.
“Basically, what it started out with was the provincial dispatch centre had called out for a request for volunteers,” said Humboldt Fire Chief Mike Kwasnica. “ I had spoken to the fire chief previous to that and offered our assistance, so we were already on the list. What the Emergency Management and Fire Safety branch did was created a list of potential equipment and manpower of what they could draw upon and then from that list, we had to wait to get the call in order to go up there in order to coordinate who’s up there and who’s not.”
The first group to travel to La Ronge consisted of Kwasnica, Craig Stomp, Jason Staniec, and Ian Irwin. They were there for four days. Breakfast was at 7 a.m., then they patrolled until somewhere between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. when the “temperature went down and the humidity went up.”
“While we were up there, we were assigned a certain sector of La Ronge. It was split up into seven different sectors,” said Kwasnica. “We were assigned Sector Three to patrol and basically what we patrolled for was any embers that were flying into town and possibly starting any spot fires.”
Aside from looking for embers, Kwasnica said they also maintained the pumps and kept the tanks full for a sprinkler line that was set up along the northern edge. While driving around, they would take a bag of food around and feed any local pets they came across. They also kept an eye out for any persons that didn’t have to be there. Their sector covered approximately five square blocks.
Like most of the other firefighters there, Kwasnica and his team are “urban” firefighters, so they took care of the inner parts of the city. The wildfires in the forest are being handled by “wild land” firefighters, water bombers, and helicopters.
“They know trees, we know buildings, so we kind of waited for it to come to us,” said Kwasnica. “We’re not really experts on wild land firefighting. Forest fires are totally different area than structure fires. So we just waited until it came to what we know.”
The second crew from Humboldt to travel to La Ronge included Darcy Leonew and Matt Schidlowsky from Humboldt, and Michael Sorokoski and Glen Fetter from Bruno. Kwasnica said that before he left, he was told there were about 200 firefighters up there. Apparently, the wildfire management team still hs a number of fire departments on the list, but they don’t want to bring in new departments until the old ones are “almost taxed out.”
“Not everybody can go for four days in a row,” said Kwasnica. “All our guys have jobs, they have regular places of employment to go to, they can’t all get time off work and they don’t want to use up all their holidays to go up north. Some of them are good, their employers will give them time off; some of them won’t.”
While Kwasnica said luck was mostly on their side with the wind blowing away from the town, that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes it got “a little hairy” when the wind changed direction and fires would flare up. Luckily, they had Prince Albert, Saskatoon, and North Battleford firefighters to help cover all the corners in the other sectors. By the time Kwasnica left, he said the number of sectors had increased from seven to 12.
“One thing I have to say is that the co-ordination by the La Ronge fire department is exceptional,” he said. “It was nice to see that many fire departments from across the province working that well together.”
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