Fire crews were divided Monday afternoon, as three fires simultaneously swept through Athabasca County.
On June 8 at 5 p.m., crews were battling blazes and heavy winds in Pine Creek, Colinton and Meanook.
Ten firefighters arrived to a bush fire along Highway 2 just south of the Colinton turnoff.
“The whole valley looked like it was full of smoke,” said Colinton Fire chief Bruce Bretzlaff.
The fire started in the grass near a power pole and took about two hours to get under control
“Luckily, every place we were there’s nothing tall and no dead grass,” he said, but the area was covered in manure. “That stuff burns like peat moss.”
Bretzlaff hasn’t determined a cause and said an investigation wouldn’t go further since the damage was minimal.
“Sometimes a bird will get electrocuted and start a fire, but nothing obvious started that one.”
Shortly after he got the call about the Colinton fire, he received a message from dispatch that Boyle also needed help. Two large peat moss piles burst into flames, which quickly spread to a field southeast of the piles.
Two-dozen firefighters were on scene from Boyle, Colinton, Newbrook and Thorhild.
“Wind conditions were pretty strong so it took the field pretty quickly,” reported Boyle Fire Captain Josh Anderson. “We were on scene almost five hours getting it under control.”
After the exhausting battle beating down the flames, the landowner took over at around 10 p.m. to manage the remaining sparks.
Anderson said the cause is still under investigation.
Meanwhile, in Meanook, a tree fell on the power line causing another fire in the backyard of county councillor Denis Willcott.
Willcott was at home when he heard a crash outside and the power went out in his house.
He went outside to check it out but didn’t see anything. When he returned inside, a man who was in the cemetery behind Willcott’s home knocked on the door and said a tree had fallen on a power line and started a fire in the backyard.
“If you have no power, you can’t pump water,” Willcott warned, but he was able to pump water from well without power and hose out the flames before fire crews arrived.
Bretzlaff sent a unit over to spray the ground and ensure the sparks had been put out.
