Alberta, Canada

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JamesVincent
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Alberta, Canada

Post by JamesVincent »

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the peoples affected by the wildfires. Haven't heard yet but I may be seeing Canada sooner then I thought, they're activating a lot of the disaster teams.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by bmxninja357 »

I was out on hwy 28 at 831 last night and it was pretty busy. About what it is on a Friday. I do have my own theories on this. But I will get to that later as its in bad taste this soon.

I'm glad injuries and fatalities are at a minimum. I'm not a respector of houses as I would just drive mine away.

I'm smoking cigarettes while Rome burns.
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eric
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, my own little village, 800 kilometres to the south is sending firefighters - BTW I trained them. A little family history - I went through my first mandatory forest fire evacuation at the age of two months and my father was a fire boss on some of the biggest forest fires in Canada - memories of summers as a small boy waking up to a chopper landing on my front lawn, being woken up by a very dirty father smelling of smoke just to say goodnight, and then a few hours later the chopper departing and not seeing my father again except for monthly intervals until the winter. Of course that was the bad old fire days in the 1950's and 60's where fire bosses had the authority to draft any able bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60 and would often set up highway road blocks to recruit workers. My father claimed he could throw 6 cases of beer in the back of a truck, hit all the bars in town, and have 50 sober firefighters by the next morning with the 4 hours of training required to carry a pack pump and a shovel. :shrug:
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

Of course that was the bad old fire days in the 1950's and 60's where fire bosses had the authority to draft any able bodied male between the ages of 16 and 60 and would often set up highway road blocks to recruit workers. My father claimed he could throw 6 cases of beer in the back of a truck, hit all the bars in town, and have 50 sober firefighters by the next morning with the 4 hours of training required to carry a pack pump and a shovel.
Exactly what happened to me in the summer of 1967. I was working at a small sawmill in Blue River, a small town in central British Columbia. I went for a long walk one night and came back to an unusually quiet bunkhouse. Next morning when I reported to the sawmill it was totally deserted. Nobody at all. I walked into town and a forest service truck drove up, stopped, and told me to get in. They'd gone through the town when I was on my walk, impressed the entire clientelle of the town's only pub and then scooped the few sawmill workers who weren't in the pub by clearing out the bunkhouse. And, just like that, I was a fire-fighter for almost a month working in Wells Grey provincial park. Dangerous work, all mountain so the fires often crowned up the mountainside we were working on. I didn't get the four hours of training or a shovel. we were issued mattocks;

Image

Still had to carry that damn pack pump though.
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs
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eric
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

And something that should piss off all the ardent FMOTL and sovereignists:
http://www.calgarysun.com/2016/05/04/qu ... -wildfires

Interestingly enough, so far the various politicians are doing their job - offer words of reassurance, activate the appropriate resources, and the rest of the time stay out of the way.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

For Burnaby and his beer (sorry) my father's attitude was that anyone who had the time to spend the afternoon in the local hotel obviously had nothing else to do with their time and was fair game for the dollar a day, bath once a week (towel, bar of soap, and a lake) type job. Interestingly enough, at least half the men he recruited in this fashion were allready trained and experienced - it gave them a few bucks more than welfare and a meaning to their life.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

eric wrote:For Burnaby and his beer (sorry) my father's attitude was that anyone who had the time to spend the afternoon in the local hotel obviously had nothing else to do with their time and was fair game for the dollar a day, bath once a week (towel, bar of soap, and a lake) type job. Interestingly enough, at least half the men he recruited in this fashion were allready trained and experienced - it gave them a few bucks more than welfare and a meaning to their life.
I didn't drink back then so I wasn't in the pub. I didn't mind being recruited. I was there to make money to pay for university and while the forest service paid a lot less per hour than the sawmill you got a lot more hours (we were paid the minimum wage on an hourly basis) along with free room and board so it pretty much balanced out. Better than sitting in town waiting for the sawmill to start up again. And I got to ride in a helicopter. One of these;

Image
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs
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eric
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

You mean a Bell 47.... Obviously you didn't have a fear of heights with that scary bubble canopy. A real work horse in Ontario for bush work.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

I loved it. Fantastic little machine. Superb visibility.
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Jeffrey »

I wanna hear BMX's theories.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by bmxninja357 »

Will expand them when I have an actual keyboard and not a phone in my unit at work.

Let's just say I'm still smoking and Rome is still burning....

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eric
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

As I mentioned previously, Albertans have this self help tradition. Our own little village sent a crew of 4 firefighters up to Fort Mac, along with one piece of apparatus - that's roughly 25% of our staff. Another village just 15 minutes down the road is doing this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/c ... -1.3569522
Since I know Carbon pretty well - half the farm is from Carbon, I will be going there tomorrow to support some sort of fundraiser they're doing.
and for Burnaby49's pleasure:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ ... -1.3569921
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

eric wrote:As I mentioned previously, Albertans have this self help tradition. Our own little village sent a crew of 4 firefighters up to Fort Mac, along with one piece of apparatus - that's roughly 25% of our staff. Another village just 15 minutes down the road is doing this:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/c ... -1.3569522
Since I know Carbon pretty well - half the farm is from Carbon, I will be going there tomorrow to support some sort of fundraiser they're doing.
and for Burnaby49's pleasure:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/ ... -1.3569921
Apparently you are not getting any help from your next-door neighbour. British Columbia has said that it can't send any fire-fighters because all of our own crews are fully engaged fighting fires here. Looks like a real bad season starting early.
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

Image

I'd prefer it to their beer.
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by bmxninja357 »

Edmonton does have very good tap water. In fact much of the bottled water sold here is just high priced edmonton tap water.

But it's great advertising.

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eric
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

The tap water in most Canadian cities is actually safer to drink than some bottled water. City water is checked constantly (about 4 times per day) for contamination using their own labs and appropriate measures are then taken. Bottled water you are depending upon the company's own measures to look after. Smaller towns, who may not have their own equipment or properly trained operators, it's another story. For ten years or so I worked for a company who supplied and serviced the water quality testing instruments for much of Canada and I could tell you some horror stories about the independant labs. That being said, I would drink the untreated effluent water from some of the major industrial operations and refineries without any issues - it's cleaner than the jugs you buy from the stores.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by bmxninja357 »

So I was by the campground at leduc #1. It's a drilling point of interest. Campground is at least half empty.

Funny. You would think they would be more open to folks.

http://www.leducnumber1.com/campground.html

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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by eric »

Burnaby49 wrote: Apparently you are not getting any help from your next-door neighbour. British Columbia has said that it can't send any fire-fighters because all of our own crews are fully engaged fighting fires here. Looks like a real bad season starting early.
I can probably guess at the reason. Ontario is sending firefighters, even though they are having their own problems north of Kenora, where I spent much of my boyhood.

It's all a case of governmental policies and strategic decisions. In the bad old days, up until the 1980's roughly, forest fire suppression was a sideline activity controlled by provincial departments responsible for timber operations. They would supply the incident commanders and equipment and recruit local labour and contract air support on site, such as yourself to hike the bush with a shovel and pump and/or 50 feet of hand line. Things changed, people wanted full time employment, so the very simplistic, mostly manual labour job somehow became skilled labour requiring all sorts of training since it is inherently unsafe. It's early in the fire season, BC hasn't called back all of its firefighters, so they're short of staff. In Ontario, almost all of the forest fire fighters are full time so they're sitting around with time on their hands.

Just as an aside, the best example I can describe that illustrates this was one 3 day fire I was a part of (staging (logistics) and water supply command). Things weren't going well until a convoy of school busses, farm equipment, and water tankers showed up and the Hutterite farm boss in charge of the convoy asked if I needed some help. We had most of the fire suppressed within 12 hours = visions of amazon farm women in long dresses and bonnets on the fire line. All totally against the rules now by the way. I'm sorry, but a big Case tractor with a 24 foot cultivator, driven by some Hutterite lad, can cut a fire break better and faster than anything done by a professional IMHO.
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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by bmxninja357 »

I'm sorry, but a big Case tractor with a 24 foot cultivator, driven by some Hutterite lad, can cut a fire break better and faster than anything done by a professional IMHO.
And we have a bingo!

Man I wish I had a full keyboard and 30 minutes to spare right now. At some point I'm going to type out some facts on this fire even if I have to do it via my phone.

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Re: Alberta, Canada

Post by Burnaby49 »

They would supply the incident commanders and equipment and recruit local labour and contract air support on site, such as yourself to hike the bush with a shovel and pump and/or 50 feet of hand line. Things changed, people wanted full time employment, so the very simplistic, mostly manual labour job somehow became skilled labour requiring all sorts of training since it is inherently unsafe.
I handled one of those hand lines at night on a burning moutainside with no training at all. Hey you, grab this hose and get going. So, yes, a little training would be adviseable although most of the fire-fighting functions, at least when I was doing it about fifty years ago, could have been done by trained monkeys. Extremely basic. Dig, spray, chop, hack.
"Yes Burnaby49, I do in fact believe all process servers are peace officers. I've good reason to believe so." Robert Menard in his May 28, 2015 video "Process Servers".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeI-J2PhdGs