BONNYVILLE – Firefighters from Station 5 Bonnyville responded to a fire that was caused by a tree that had fallen on to a powerline at an Imperial Oil Resources site, near the Mahikan plant at 3:02 p.m. on July 19.
“With the higher winds, a large Jack Pine tree essentially fell over,” Regional Fire Chief Dan Heney told Lakeland This Week.
“It's root ball gave up. It fell over on powerlines and the arcing from the power lines on the tree that it touched started to drop burning needles onto the ground. And then those burning needles lit fires all around.”
Imperial Oil staff had mostly extinguished the fire prior to arrival of Bonnyville Regional Fire Authority (BRFA) crews, noted Heney.
The location where the tree had fallen was an area containing significant moisture that helped to reduce the spread of the fire.
“(The area) was not quite marshy, but close enough to marshland that it didn't spread very far, and it didn't move very fast. But in another week after the winds that we're having, and the temperatures that we have, there was a potential for that to blow up into something really big,” said the regional fire chief.
Once ATCO Power had confirmed that the power lines were de-energized and had put grounding in place, BRFA crews completed a mop up of the remaining hotspots.
ATCO also removed the tree from the lines.
BRFA then chopped the fallen tree into manageable pieces and felled four more trees that had the potential to threaten the power line in the future, according to Heney.
“The fact that the fire happened in that moist of an area goes to show that with the winds and the temperature, we actually have high burning potential,” he said.
In total, the incident took about 90 minutes to bring under control completely.
During the operation, an Alberta Forestry helicopter arrived to view the site, which falls within the provincially monitored Lac La Biche Forest Area, to see if the BRFA required any extra resources.
“As it was a small incident that the BRFA had under control, the Alberta Forestry crews left to monitor another fire start further to the North,” noted the regional fire chief.
