Trapped overnight by a forest fire

Five crews of fire fighters were surrounded by flames while battling forest fires near Sandy Lake this summer.
“It was pretty scary,” said Perry Perrault, an SP-100 forest fire fighter who was trapped by the forest fire. “We watched a large wall of flames, 80-foot trees, 120-foot flames. You could hear it from two kilometres across the lake. It was loud – it sounded like a freight train.”
Perrault said there wasn’t any chance for a helicopter to rescue the five crews from the shore of the small lake they were stranded on as it was approaching 10 p.m., so they had to stay there overnight and wait for rescue in the morning.
“The next morning they picked us up,” said the Nigigoonsiminikaaning (Red Gut) band member who now lives in Thunder Bay. “The fire had subsided, but as soon as 10 a.m. hit those flames started again, this time in two areas and it jumped both river systems on that small lake. We returned to that same area four days later and the whole area was burned.”
Perrault said he was ready to blow his air mattress up and paddle out into the middle of the lake.
“My crew boss said he’d seen this before,” Perrault said. “He was trying to settle me down.”
Perrault said the forest fire had been out when they landed to clean up any remaining hot spots.
“We were not allowed to walk in the centre of the burn because all the roots systems were gone,” Perrault said, explaining the roots had been burned by an underground fire. “The trees looked healthy, 12 inches in diameter, but they have no root system and they just fall in the slightest wind.”
Perrault said they would receive radio calls to get out of the burn area whenever the slightest wind blew.
“It was the first time I’ve ever been to a really live, big fire,” Perrault said. “Flying in we saw several fires and we flew over a dozen fires that were active.”
Perrault worked with fire fighting crews from Newfoundland, B.C. and the Northwest Territories.
“We were not the initial attack (fire fighters)” Perrault said about his fire fighting crew. “We pretty much mop up, clean up, roll up hoses.”
Perrault said there was a shortage of fire fighting equipment throughout the north due to the large number of forest fires.
“As soon as one fire was out ... they do a heat scan over the burned areas, and if there is no (fire) we go in there and clean it up,” Perrault said. “And then they transport all the hoses to another fire. We were doing that constantly (with) helicopter rides every day. I can’t get used to that – ears popping.”
Perrault said a number of forest fire specialists were brought back from retirement to help out with the Sandy Lake forest fire.
“These guys were in their 70s, a couple of guys in their 80s,” Perrault said. “They were fire behavioral scientists. They go in there and inspect the type of fuel being burned. They can ascertain how fast this fire is going to expand or which way it’s going to branch out.”
After three weeks fighting the Sandy Lake fire, Perrault and his fire fighting crew were given a week off before they were flown up to the North Spirit Lake area to battle another forest fire for three weeks.