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At their behest, the team quickly assembled a staging area at MacDonald Island Park, the city’s newly expanded leisure centre, with the Wood Buffalo team. Cornforth said even though the situation was beyond any training activity the crew had ever run, everyone fell back to the basics of the Incident Command System, a standardized on-site fire management system. Staging managers ensured trucks were registered, fuelled up and out in the field quickly.

estimated that 1,600 structures had burned. Wednesday morning, Cornforth did a recon flight over the city to determine how crews should be split up to fight the never-slowing fires. They decided to split the city into south and north divisions, the area in which Cornforth was tasked with co-ordinating. Their main points of focus were Timberlea, Thickwood and some of the industrial structures along Highway 63. Cornforth said he estimates there were 80 pieces of fire apparatuses and 300 firefighters split between the north and south divisions at the time. But, just as important, the staging areas had also become home to essential support elements such as a camp kitchen staffed by volunteers, a fuelling site and a fleet maintenance station with fire equipment- trained mechanics. And, said Cornforth, since an army marches on their stomach, meal delivery services were even put in place. A team would ride up with Leduc Fire Services to meet with front- line firefighters and take over the efforts while the tireless crews got a chance to have a meal. The camaraderie on the fire lines was very apparent, according to Cornforth. The Wood Buffalo team, despite fighting for their home turf, never flinched and seemed to be strengthened by their industry partners who had come at a moment’s notice to help.

“It is not a return to normal life and it’s not yet a celebration. There’s still a lot of work to recover and rebuild Wood Buffalo. This will

be the work of years, not weeks,” Alberta Premier Rachel Notley.

It was the beginning of an exhausting three days of 24-hour shifts — not only for the fire departments and mutual aid partners, but also the city’s police service and hospital staff who had already evacuated 105 patients from Northern Lights Regional Health Centre during the mandatory evacuation. Through the evening and into the night, fire destroyed homes in Beacon Hill, Waterways, Abasand and Wood Buffalo. By dawn it was

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