Residents of the Robson Valley community of Crescent Spur, site of a 174-hectare wildfire that prompted an evacuation alert two weeks ago, are convinced that fire was sparked by a passing train.
Danielle Alan, the Robson Valley-Canoe (Area H) regional district director, said with the region still experiencing near-record drought conditions there’s a growing threat of more fires in the dry conditions and a need for residents and authorities to be more vigilant about finding ways to prevent wildfires like the one that got out of control at Crescent Spur.
“About two weeks prior to that there was another fire at that same location (near Prospect Road), that was put out much more quickly, and it was sparked right along the tracks,” said Alan, who raised the issue of train-caused fires at Thursday’s Regional District of Fraser-Fort George public meeting.
“The people whose properties were affected said it more than likely was a rail fire. They would definitely know. There was another fire in the Red Rock area (which started May 11) and as far as I know there’s been four or five rail fires started in the Robson Valley between Tete Jaune (Cache) and Dome Creek in the spring dip, before the green has come up and the grass and winter debris is super dry.”
When it was reported to BC Wildfire Service on the afternoon Friday, May 10, temperatures were in the mid-20s, one of the hottest days of the year so far.
That same weekend about 20 km south of Prince George near Red Rock, Hxon resident Tamara Colebank spotted three fires along the CN track on the east side of Highway 97 where a train was stopped.
Colebank and Hixon Volunteer Fire Department chief Gerald Thompson are both convinced those May 11 fires were caused by the train. Volunteer firefighters responded from the Red Rock and Pineview halls and put the fires out.
The Crescent Spur fire burned out of control until May 15, when the evacuation alert was rescinded. Aided by significant rainfall, it’s being held by BC Wildfire firefighters and is not expected to grow beyond its current perimeters.
Train-sparked fires have been an ongoing issue for Alan since she was first elected to represent Area H in 2014. After the most recent Crescent Spur fire, she relayed her concerns to Anita deDreu, the RSFFG emergency programs coordinator, who met with officials from CN Rail.
“CN is saying they have three water tankers ready to go and talked about what they are doing to combat fires, but it’s been challenging working with CN,” said Alan.
“They are a law unto themselves. They’ve got a federal mandate and a lot of money is tied up in those rail lines and I’m sure that CN does the best they can, however, they don’t allocate to keep these tracks safe, especially in a changing climate. I’m sure they can do it and it’s just a matter of making it more costly for them not to do it, whether that will be through publicity or federal intervention.
“Public pressure will cost them in terms of PR, especially with everyone terrified of fires these days, or the government needs to step in and start enforcing their own regulations.”
The area where the Crescent Spur fire was centred is about 60 km east of the Ancient Forest, where giant cedar and Sitka spruce trees continue to grow year-round in a moist climate. Because it is a wet climate, lightning-caused fires usually don’t spread to the surrounding forest. But with this year’s continuance of the extreme drought conditions that plagued the central Interior has raised concerns there will be more out-of-control fires this summer.
“We live in a rain forest and nothing has caused any damage, but as we saw in the Crescent Spur fire, things have changed,” said Alan. “We were really lucky to get moisture when we did, but we can’t count on that.
“So much of the train tracks run through unincorporated communities without access to a fire service. I would love to CN being more proactive and work with communities so they can have fire caches. Donate trailers and fire equipment so that they can help and be a part of the solution.”
Gary Wallace, a retired firefighter and medic who administers a FireSmart fire prevention program from his home base at Tete Jaune Cache, said outlying communities connected by the CN east-west track in Dunster, McBride and Crescent Spur each used to have access to firewagon equipped with a 50-or-60-gallon tank that could be hauled to fire sites by volunteer firefighters. But he said CN discontinued the wagon service because the company said people were using them to water their lawns.
“Ours has never been used for that,” said Wallace. “We looked at buying it three or four years ago. The wagon used to be in our hall in a separate area where we all had access to it and we could go pull it and put out spark fires or whatever and it was very handy.”
Wallace and his wife moved to Tete Jaune Cache from Alberta and have lived in the area since 2004. He says he’s helped put out four train-caused fires in the time he’s been there but he knows there have been a lot more.
“Just four that I was involved in, but my wife and I had a contract at the fire station here and one of the assistants had a satellite map and you could see a train going south that was starting fires all along because the bearings were going, heating up embers to fly out.
“Since I’ve been around we’ve seen between a dozen and two dozen (train-caused fires) and the thing is they don’t seem to want to take any responsibility for this. We’ve been lucky lately in our area, but in the past I can’t see why CN wouldn’t support some volunteer groups going out to fight the fire because they aren’t able to respond that quickly.”
In the Fraser Lake district, 160 km northwest of Prince George, at least seven fires have been attributed to trains over the past two years. The most recent happened April 14 in nearby Endako and it was extinguished by Yellowhead Road and Bridge employees working in the area.
Quick responses from Coastal Gas Link fire suppression crews and equipment stationed on the outskirts of the village put out most of those fires near the tracks in 2022 and 2023, but now that the pipeline project in completed the work crews have left the area and that worries Fraser Lake Mayor Sarrah Storey.
“Our goal is to make sure that whatever is causing the repeated fires near railway tracks is addressed,” said Storey. “We do not need any more wildfires in the region of B.C.”
Alan oversees a vast sparsely-populated territory that has just 2,500 people living outside the municipalities of McBride and Valemount. She continually offers FireSmart advice to residents on how to make their properties more resident to wildfires and be watchful, especially when trains move through the area.
She wants residents to keep records of all the fires started by trains and make that information available to the regional district, which can then be used to put pressure on CN to step up its fire mitigation efforts and help prevent disasters like the June 30, 2021 fire .
“What if there’s a catastrophic fire like there was in Lytton?” said Alan. “There’s conversations around whether that was cause by a train. If a train does cause a fire that wipes out a small community, we want to make sure that they can be held accountable. If we have a record of all the track fires in the area it makes it easier to hold them to account to say this is not an uncommon occurrence.
“We need an all-province approach to fire safety and fire management around here. It’s become more dangerous. There are more interface fires, more people on the landscape and more chances of a fire causing more damage.”