R.M. of Weyburn Reeve comments on community firefighting effort

Thanks to help from local farmers, firefighters were able to get under control a wildland fire on Wednesday afternoon just south of McTaggart, which spread rapidly due to 90 km/h winds. 

"Everybody, and I mean everybody, just drops what they're doing, and just run in, and bring whatever you can, and do whatever you can to help out," commented the Reeve of the R.M. of Weyburn, Norm McFadden. "It's amazing to see the amount of equipment that came out there (in minutes, really) because there wasn't a lot of time.". 

He said while he tried, he was unable due to limited visibility, to count the number of farmers who brought their cultivators, graders, and other heavy machinery to the scene to turn as much soil as possible, in an effort to create a fire guard. 

"The farmers out there, they're risking their own safety, their own equipment, but you don't think of that stuff, right? You just do whatever you can to to help out," he said.

McFadden said that as bad as it was, it could have been worse. 

"There's the one homeowner that that did lose their home, and just a quarter mile down the road there was a cluster of acreages. So if the wind direction would have been a little bit different, all of a sudden we'd be talking about four or five families that lost their homes. As bad as it was, it could have been a whole lot worse."

He said not only is he thankful to everybody in the community, he was flooded with calls from people asking what they could do to help. From water trucks, to more graders, to phoning more people with equipment.

"Anybody who had anything that could move dirt was there," he shared. "They were working the stubble in to turn the ground black so there's nothing to burn, graders pushing up ridges, guys with water trucks spraying shelterbelts down to try and keep it out of the trees."

He said these are, 'good community people all around, nobody worries about anything but getting a fire out'.

"You don't worry about getting your kid to hockey practice or your own work on your own farm," he said. "Someone said it to me this morning, you know how if you're on fire, 'stop, drop and roll'? For a fire like this, it's, 'stop, drop everything and go to the fire and help out'." 

"To be honest, you could see lots of smoke, but it was a hard to see where exactly all the fire was, the flames," he added.

McFadden said he knows some producers who haven't gotten their crops off yet, but aren't going out to finish harvest during extreme winds. 

"They're not running on days like today, because of a simple spark, and by the time you see the smoke when it's windy, it's too late. That's when you get the results of what we had yesterday."

Read more in the linked article below from Weyburn's Fire Chief Trent Lee on the progress of fighting the fire.