Firefighters from a BC Wildfire Service uni crew pause for a break amid extreme heat while battling a wildfire in the province’s North Shuswap region in August, 2023. Already on their 6th two-week deployment of the season, they and many other firefighters said they were at risk of burning out. The 2023 season became the longest and deadliest wildfire season in recent memory, killing eight firefighters across western Canada.
In June, as the winds howled through the largest wildfire in British Columbia’s history, 50-foot-tall spruce trees, burnt and blackened from the flames, came crashing down within metres of Rose Velisek.
Velisek, a third-year wildland firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, was told by a superior to “keep her head up … but keep working, keep hosing down the fire,” so she swallowed her fear and did as she was instructed.
“There’s this sense of pressure and anxiety towards getting the job done,” Velisek says. “It doesn’t matter if your safety is going to be compromised, you still gotta be out there doing it.”
The day left her uneasy — a feeling that would grow over the next two months, as her crew worked 16-hour days on back-to-back deployments on three major wildfires in northern B.C.
It would soon be described as Canada’s worst wildfire season in recent years, a new trend as climate change drives wildfires to be more intense and more frequent. But Western Canada’s wildland firefighters say they’re struggling to cope with another out-of-control inferno: a crisis of burnout and post-traumatic stress syndrome, driven by extreme working conditions, low pay, high turnover and — in Alberta — government cutbacks.
The BC Wildfire Service says it’s working hard to improve the culture of wildfire fighting, to ensure safety is a priority. Meanwhile, firefighters in Alberta say they’re being pushed to new extremes, both by the intensity of the work and the length of their shifts.
The Narwhal spoke with 18 current and former wildland firefighters, who in total have more than 160 seasons of frontline wildfire experience. Many asked to keep their names confidential because they were not authorized to speak to media and feared losing their jobs or contracts. All spoke of the extreme physical and mental toll of the job.
That toll is largely not quantified, according to Nicola Cherry, an occupational epidemiologist and professor in the department of medicine at the University of Alberta.
“We know very little indeed about what happens to wildland firefighters over many years of working on fires — what effect that has on their long-term health,” she says. “There’s really no data in Canada about the effects.”
Read the full story here, at TheNarwhal.ca
