It could happen here..... You must remember this as your older than dirt...
1938 A Fire Burns Thousands of Acres
Hot dry weather and strong winds in the summer of 1938 brought devastation to the sparsely populated settlement around Campbell River, a bustling community engaged in commerce through the logging and commercial fisheries.
Just north of Campbell River, a fire of unknown origin ignited in a pile of slag timber at the sight of camp 5, a logging community owned by the Bloedel Logging Company, it would come to be known as the Great Bloedel Fire. The flames were quickly spotted and brought under control by several employees of the logging company who reacted with swift action. However; as a result of the long term dry conditions, the prevailing winds and the fact that the fire was not completely distinguished; smaller fires were popping up around and under the slag heap, a term used for a huge garbage pile of wood.
Felled and dried timber are highly flammable, at the best of times great care is required to keep the timber away from anything that may cause a spark and in 1938 fire fighting equipment and procedures were still considered primitive, especially in the light of the fact that these logging camps were deep in the woodlands and only access to resources was limited and minimal at best, coupled with the inaccessibility to the burning timber offered a difficult receipt for the fighting of a fire that was to gain such momentum as to become one of the biggest fires Vancouver Island has ever seen.
Everyone Pitches in to Help
Local Loggers arrived to assist the exhausted men who were beating back the smaller fires with vigor for several days, gaining ground one day only to loose it to another flare up the next. It became evident after the first 4 days that things were getting out of control, all the elements and in particular the wind were against the hardened loggers who were fighting the inferno 24 hours a day and the fire was gaining ground faster than they could beat it down. Soon the blaze was out of control. The company shut down all of their north Island operations and sent men from the entire region to fight the burn that was quickly threatening the village of Campbell River, just a few miles to the south.
With hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest surrounding the area, you could imagine the fear that this threat posed for the entire region. Within a week it was clear that outside resources were going to be needed to help fight the fire that was now encompassing several hundred hectares of land. At this time the Provincial Legislating assembly stepped in to assist and thousands of would be fire fighters were lining up in Victoria to help out at a rate of .25 cents an hour. Hero’s were born of the disaster, such as a local telephone operator Jenny Boffy who stayed at her switchboard for 24 hours at a time when the danger from the blaze was at its height.
Loss on a Grand Scale
A disastrous loss of timber resulted. A prolonged heat wave coupled with high winds kept the flames raging for almost 3 months, exhausted and beaten, many of the exhausted men had given up hope, then in mid August it started to rain, and rain it did in a manner only seen on the west coast. Weeks of torrential downpours saved not only the settlement at Campbell River, but Merville and Courtenay also, the only loss of structure was the Forbes Landing Hotel on the banks of McIvor Lake. The devastation had completely passed Campbell River although it burned a swath of timber some 40 miles long and 4 miles wide, about three miles inland, destroying 75,000 acres of timber, enough to build 200,000 homes. The flames abated preserving a small stand of timber at the sight of Elk Falls and being distinguished at what was christened Miracle Beach.
More than the loss of timber the fire gave new credence to safety in the timberlands and was to benchmark the largest reforestation project in the world. With the attention of the provincial Forestry Departments to forest regeneration, intensifying planting strategies to restock not just burnt out; but logged areas also, with many of these programs still in place today.
