Base-Rats

Jun 7 - Jun 19
Hanging out at Base: Fixing Equipment

So today I am supposed to become an official university graduate. But I am missing my convocation because it is just not worth my time. Driving 9 hours to wait for hours while people I don't really know walk across a stage, all just to get my own 2-second special moment, where I shake someone's hand that I've never actually met before. That is my opinion, which may be just slightly biased and a teensy bit bitter, because I do wish I was there to celebrate with my friends. I will celebrate for you up here in Cochrane :)

The past 10 days have been a blur of monotonous days on the base. The weather cooled down for awhile, so there weren't many red alerts. Not to mention that our crew member stopped showing up for work AGAIN, which essentially renders our crew useless. On a positive note, there was a ton to do around base for the first week, because equipment was coming back from the fires, which meant lots and lots to do in the workshop. Each and every single piece of equipment needs to be serviced (taken apart, cleaned, greased, fixed etc) and tagged as such before it can be used again. Even if it still works fine. So that kept is busy for quite some time.

On Friday and Saturday night we had some epic times at Thib's tavern, which resulted with a very hungover bunch of fire fighters on Sunday. But we take it in stride! When Monday finally came around I felt rested and ready to get back into being healthy, but alas, when I got to the gym in the morning I found a completely shut down building. Apparently they pumps had shut down and the ventilators weren't working, so the pool was closed, and pool's fumes were intoxicating, so the whole building had to be shut down. I was angry.

Tuesday morning was exciting because I got to accompany my crew leader and crew boss on a thermal scan of our fire, Hearst 20. It still hadn't been called out, because there hadn't been three clean scans. This was the third one. They were both strapped into harnesses so they could lean out the open helicopter doors and look at the burn with the scanners. It was mildly alarming to see them hanging out of the chopper like that, but I got to sit in the front seat, so I was too excited to be nervous for them. The front seat is definitely waaay better than the back and I got some sweet views of our old fire. We smelled a smoke a couple times, but we were unable to find it's exact location with the thermal scan. This resulted in us being sent out to the fire on Wednesday morning to look for the elusive smoke.

Being back at my old fire was very strange. All the familiar landmarks looked different because there were no pumps, no camps and definitely no hose lines anymore. Everything had been pulled out and it made it feel very lonely. I kept expecting to run into another crew patrolling their area. After a long day of walking through the burn we found nothing. We smelled it a few times and stopped to see if we could smell it again and get a direction, but nadda. But there was one exciting thing about Wednesday! Our MIA crew member finally came in and quit!!! It sounds weird, but that is great news for us because now we can finally move on. We are officially a three person crew, which means we can go on dispatches anywhere in the district and up north, but without special permission we would not be allowed out of province because of the four-person crew regulations. So three things can happen now:
- they leave us a three person crew
- they hire an EFF to fill our vacant crew member position
- they split us up and make three five-person crews

Either way I feel very relieved!

Thursday and Friday were my days off, which consisted of a ton of biking, four-wheeling, fishing and partying. Erik taught me how to cast and I caught three pike! The pike are getting slimy now, so we didn't keep any, but I was still super proud :)
There were obviously lots of patio drinks, horse-shoe games and Thib's evenings involved.

Saturday I was back at work, super tired and what not. BIG NEWS today! We are going up north to do "Community Profiling". This basically means we have to figure out how much hose we would need to protect certain 'values' (houses, buildings etc). And when I say up north I mean allllllll the way up north! We fly to Fort Severn first (the most northerly community in Ontario), and then over the next five days we will work our way south until we hit Moosenee. Due to the dangerous territory we don't camp out there, so we will be staying in hotels the whole time. Sweet! We got all of our food and supplies ready, because once we're up there most things won't be available, and the things that are will be super expensive. Kiiinda excited!