Cole Paciejewski didn’t hear it over the sound of his chainsaw, but his co-worker saw it coming and let out a yell.
Paciejewski had just enough time to jump out of the way as a huge spruce fell to ground, inches away from crushing him.
It can happen any day, any time for the brave souls fighting fires for the BC Wildfire Service. As a certified tree faller with 12 years of forest firefighting experience that was Paciejewski’s job as a crew leader until he was hired by the city as a member of Prince George Fire Rescue a few months ago.
He knows how close he came to escaping death that day near Bear Lake and it serves as a reminder of the inherent danger that comes with fighting wildfires. Devyn Gale was not so lucky. The 19-year-old died July 13 when she was hit by a falling tree while clearing brush near a small fire close to Revelstoke.
“You never know when that stuff’s going to come down,” said the 29-year-old Paciejewski. ”That’s probably one of the scariest things you have to do is fall sketchy trees, especially when you’re that far away from any hospitals.”
Danger tree falling is considered one of the most dangerous occupations in Canada and Paciejewski often had to cut down trees that were burning.
“Before it’s safe for people in an area to go in and work you have to get a certified danger tree assessor to go in there and say which ones are dangerous and then a faller has to come in and fall them to make the area safe,” he said.
“My understanding was that someone was working with a chainsaw to cut a trail into the fire and (Gale) was a swamper following up behind the chainsaw getting all the debris off the trail and think a freak tree came down and landed on her.”
Eric Lane had his share of scary moments in the nine years he worked with the Prince George Fire Zone initial attack crew. In 2015, his first summer, working the Little Bobtail Lake fire southwest of Prince George in 2015, Lane and his crew of four were caught by surprise. Firefighters always try to maintain two escape routes but there was only one way out that day and they had no choice but to pile into their trucks and run a terrifying gauntlet to get to a safety.
“There were some radio communication challenges as we normally have in the summer and I guess there was miscommunication and nobody had any idea where I was at the time,” said Lane. “There was a tactical (evacuation) and somehow we got cornered in with fire all around us and we ended up driving several kilometres on this little first service road with fire on either side. It looked like hell.
“We got very lucky, we had our air conditioning on but we could smell it and all the paint had burnt off the side of the trucks. We got out and hosed them down because they were smoking and steaming. It was something right out of movie.”
Wildfire workers during fire season are sometimes deployed to other provinces or countries and in 2020 Lane and Paciejewski were sent to Oregon to help the state deal with a rash of fires, where they saw things there they’d never encountered in B.C.
In some of the towns they drove through, houses on either side of the street were leveled by fires.
“It was eye-opening for us to go to the States because it seemed like such a normal occurrence for them,” said Lane. “That Oregon fire rolled through a bunch of towns and there was nothing left. That’s their reality come summertime.”
Lane and Paciejewski were sent to Fort McMurray in May 2016 to help fight the fire that destroyed nearly 2,400 homes and buildings, but at no other time did they see a Canadian town wiped out by a wildfire.
“I think fire seasons keep getting worse and worse,” said Paciejewski. “If you look back on the 10 worst fire seasons in Canadian history we worked a lot of them, in 2014, 2017, 2018, 2021 and now 2023, that’s five of the worst all within the last 10 years.”
Both used their forestry background to get their feet in the door as city firefighters. Lane joined the fire department a year ago, following in the footsteps of his father John, who served as PGFR chief from 2011-13. More than half the 120 members in fire suppression at PGFR are former forestry service firefighters.
“It’s a wonderful way to spend a summer,” said Lane, 32. “You get lots of translatable skills and the whole team environment and get a hand in putting some wet stuff on hot stuff.”
For Paciejewski, the seed was planted in a Grade 10 class at D.P. Todd Secondary when he found out about firefighting careers. He started in the junior firefighting program as one of five high school students who trained for months leading into the summer fire season. From that point he was hooked.
Both are adrenaline junkies who thrived on the challenge of putting out fires, saving infrastructure or people’s homes and keeping our forests from looking like moonscapes. Looking back on his wildfire career, Paciejewski says it’s easy to remember his worst day. It happened in late June 2021, during the heat dome that enveloped the province, producing 43 C heat to a fire line he was working near Fort Nelson.
“It was the hottest day of the heat dome and I had to work a 16-hour day up there and we had to cut a trail with a chainsaw into the fire and it took me 12 hours,” he said. “I drank 30 bottles of water, I think, and didn’t use the washroom once. I was just completely drenched (in sweat) the entire day. I’ve never worked so hard.”
In 2017, they were working the Plateau Complex fire west of Quesnel near Nazko where Paciejewski saw something awe inspiring.
“We got pulled off the fire because it wasn’t safe to work on the fire, it was so aggressive,” said Paciejewski. ““There was a lot of dead pine trees and they start piling up 10 feet high, there was so much fuel to burn.
"It went for a 20-kilometre run and it put so much smoke up into the air it was actually the smoke that was shooting off lightning and starting new fires. I’d heard about pyrocumulonimbus clouds but that was only time I’d actually seen it.”
As part of the initial attack crew, Paciejewski and Lane were often dealing with small fires in remote locations accessible only by helicopter. Their first aid training focused on getting the patient stabilized and packaged for air transport to the hospital, but serious accidents were rare.
Now as members of the city firefighting force their job description has changed radically and they’re trained to fight structure fires and save people and buildings rather than trees. In the first five months of this year, medical calls made up 63 per cent of emergency calls to the Prince George fire halls.
All city firefighters are certified as Emergency Medical Responders, one level below that of a Primary Care Paramedic. Seeing their medical interventions as first responders have a direct impact on lives is an element of the job Lane especially likes.
“BC Wildfire was very rewarding, that you were able to help a whole place, but you were just one little cog,” said Lane. “Whereas this job you can be on an engine of four people and you four are making drastic change to a small population within Prince George itself.”
