2007 Forest Fire Season: Alberta

[Jay911]

[EDIT: Might as well convert this into a quasi-sticky for this fire season..]


AFS is apparently operating out of Springbank (CYBW) this year as well as the others. A relative has spotted several air tankers marshalled on the apron, as well as the usual fleet of rented/hired rotary- and fixed-wing machines for spotting and helitac teams.

Springbank Airport's normal airside frequencies are in the Rocky View portion of the database, here: http://www.radioreference.com/modules.php?name=RR&aid=681

The helicopter/helitac teams use Alberta Firenet for their comms, here: http://www.radioreference.com/modules.php?name=RR&aid=3838

Channel 109 (Moose Mountain) is used in the area nearest to Calgary. I've named some of the repeaters I know about; you can probably follow conversations if you listen to repeaters when in their areas, as described in the DB. If you come up with some other names, please submit them so I can add them in.

I'm gonna try to visit YBW sometime in the next week, as well as do a bit of road-tripping in the near-to-middle-distances around Calgary (i.e., Drumheller-ish and areas around that distance away), so I hope to have some DB updates soon.

 

[Jay911]

Air tankers are doing training/practice drops in the Elbow region right now, tankers 685 and 684 are working between the Elbow and Barrier Lake (which is their pickup point). Comms are on Tanker Ch 6 (122.775).

 

[Jay911]

I've done some updates to the FireNet stuff. The four new "Tanker Comms" channels are ones that are licensed to the Calgary fire base but not on my sheets. The other updates are to show input freqs and locations for a few more sites.

 

[Heterodyne]

Thanks for the updates.

Down here, they've totally buttoned down the forests, and closed pretty much every provincial park and rec area from Waterton to Nanton. They've even booted the loggers and gas workers out, the conditions are so dangerous.

I was talking to an information officer for SRD yesterday, and she says the conditions in the forests are about five times worse than they before during the 2003 Lost Creek fire. They've relocated hundreds of forestry and SRD workers down south, and helicopter patrols from the Blairmore ranger station are almost non-stop.

They won't say it on the record, but they are REALLY worried. You know it's bad when they won't even let hikers into the forests. They've even mentioned that they're worried about metal shoelace tips making sparks on rocks.

 

[Jay911]

Not a surprise to me.. we had no rain this spring in comparison to past years (when we had too damn much of the stuff). My municipality is not officially going into a ban at this point, but keeping an eye on things.. despite the fact that we abut Kananaskis and other municipal districts which have enacted bans.

Time for that old "Don't even fart in the forest" pic I found on the net from BC a few years back, methinks...

 

[Jay911]

Busy today in the near Calgary area. Between the Ghost/Morley and Elbow/Sheep regions I have listened to no less than four smoke sightings in the past hour. I live very close to one of the first ones, which erupted shortly after a wickedly severe thunderstorm stomped through the area. The ridge directly across the valley from my house was struck no less than 15 times by lightning, and it is only a kilometer or two from where the one smoke was seen.

I hear at least two Bird Dog aircraft, four helicopter/helitac teams, and multiple tankers on the radio right now. Several are heading south to a site southwest of Longview, and the rest are going to a spot in Morley. One of them was also working a small fire (0.2 ha) fairly close by with some CL215 and CL415 tankers. (Unfortunately the rain and mist had me socked in at that point and I couldn't see the aircraft.)

The primary radio channel for this area is FireNet 109, in the "Alberta Forest Service" section of the database. The Bird Dog crafts seem to prefer keeping the helicopters and tankers with them on 129.8 or 128.95 depending on what location they're in. (In my particular area I have some odd birdie or RFI on 128.95, so it's a little irritating to try to listen on that channel).

Provincial fire ban radio spots have been playing constantly on the commercial radio stations I listen to. Like HBD says, things are pretty nutty. The storm that rolled through here cut power to the area a couple times, so the gas plants had to go into shutdown/flaring mode - which isn't making the aircrews very happy as they fly from flare stack to flare stack.

I forget if I added this tidbit on one of my earlier posts on the topic, but if you are browsing the TAFL and/or listening to the radio, you will hear some callsigns and abbreviations. Here's what I have myself:

SR2 - Len Wilton. "SR" presumably for Sustainable Resource (Development), or whatever the latest incarnation/name is. Len is basically the manager of the Bow Crow corridor.

XMC26 - This is the provincial firebase in Calgary (known as "CGY", for obvious reasons, in the TAFL).

Elbow Base - the former Elbow Ranger Station, now dedicated to being a fire base for Forestry, in the middle of the Elbow section of Kananaskis, right where the Elbow River crosses Highway 66.

Ghost Base - the former Ghost Ranger Station, in the Municipal District of Bighorn, north on Hwy 40/940 from Hwy 1A, near Waiparous, WNW of Calgary.

Sheep Day Base - the former Highwood/Sheep Ranger Station, in the far south end of Kananaskis Country, essentially due west of Turner Valley.

XMC239 - Ribbon Creek Emergency Center. This is the Fire/EMS/Conservation Officers/RCMP station directly across Highway 40 from Kananaskis Village. It's where 911 calls for all of Kananaskis are handled; it also maintains dispatch for Fire & EMS crews in west Kananaskis and Conservation Officers for the entire region.

Engine 31 - The wildland brush truck (essentially a beefed up Bush Buggy, if you are familiar with that type of equipment) stationed at the Elbow Base.

Engine 17 - Wildland truck stationed at Ghost.

Here are some of the abbreviations in the TAFL:

PFFC - Provincial Forest Fire Center. Located in Elk Island.
WCT - Whitecourt
EDS - Edson
PR - Peace River
LLB - Lac La Biche
FTM - Fort MacMurray
HL - High Level
GP - Grande Prairie
RMH (or sometimes misspelled RHM) - Rocky Mountain House
SLK - Slave Lake
ATB - Air Tanker Base (Pincher Creek)
CGY - Calgary; as mentioned above - basically at the base of the Bearspaw Dam.

I'm toying with the idea of making this a sticky post if the fire action stays busy this year. We'll see what happens.

 

[Heterodyne]

Which frequency would I listen to down in the Crowsnest/Blairmore ranger station area? Am I right to think Livingstone, Firenet 115?

I'm an expat from Toronto, not 100% familiar with the area yet.

 

[Jay911]

I'm pretty sure that's the right one. Have you been getting anything on it?

This "Lys Ridge" one that I just picked out of TAFL the other day (apparently known as FN 123, but not ID'd as Lys on the list I had picked up) is a couple dozen miles due south of you, too, right on the AB/BC border. Might try it.

Actually, Carbondale tower (either FN114 or FN122 depending on the tone) is about halfway in between Crowsnest and Lys Ridge, from what I can see on Google (with the TAFL lat/long data). But Livingstone is indeed closest - it's reported at both the Blairmore fire centre and the actual Livingstone lookout itself is at Hwy 940 x Hwy 517, about 10 miles due north of the town of Blairmore (which is probably where the "fire centre" is).

A couple years ago, the BC guys (IIRC) put together a map of waypoints or Google Earth/Maps points detailing all their repeater sites. I'm wondering if it's not beneficial to do the same here. (bcradio - I'm not thinking of the forestry maps you guys had, it was something else - maybe not BC, I could be wrong)

@Heterodyne: You out here for good now, or at least a while? East getting too hot?

 

[Heterodyne]

Thanks for the help, Jay! I haven't had a chance to plunk them into my scanner yet.. it's at work and I'm enjoying my day off...!! My office is right in Blairmore and I watch the choppers lifting off from the ranger station constantly - all I hear them on is Unicom, but I'll see what I can get.

I'm a reporter at the local paper in the Pass, so I'm here for good - at least until my editor decides I don't know what I'm doing

And don't talk to me about heat, man.. when I moved here everyone told me that it's cooler in the mountains. I felt like I was back in Taiwan for a few days this summer, man!

 

[Jay911]

I found a whole bunch of great maps and data on the Sustainable Resource Development website. One map in particular is 8 megs in PDF form and has pretty neat detail.

This is at 275%:

For what it's worth, there is a Carbondale radio tower and a Livingstone tower, as well as one on Porcupine, but Sugarloaf and Ironstone don't come up on my freq list from the TAFL.

Here's the URL for the maps: http://srd.alberta.ca/wildfires/maps/default.aspx

And something on wildfires in progress: http://srd.alberta.ca/wildfires/information/

I am going to try to put all the repeater sites on a Google Earth KMZ file. Besides the Firenet freqs, there are some interesting UHF frequencies which appear to be some kind of crossband link for various sites. Still investigating..

 

[Heterodyne]

Thanks for the info!

I've put in all of the firenet frequencies, but I've heard zero activity on them. All I hear are the Blairmore helicopters announcing intentions on UNICOM. I thought for sure I'd hear something.....

 

[Jay911]

As promised, I'm attaching a .kmz file (zipped up - I know it's zipped already as part of the kmz format, but this is to allow it to be attached here) with all the Forestry repeater sites according to TAFL. Each placemark in the attached file is a unique location in the province - not necessarily a separate callsign though, just all the radio channels assigned to any given location.

"FN xxx" in the description of each placemark should be obvious, identifying the FireNet repeater site. Where possible I have named the appropriate FireNet repeater. In most sites, all three channels of a given frequency pair (i.e. FN 101, FN 108, FN 115) are listed because as far as I know there's no way to tell from the TAFL what PL/DPL is in use at a given site.

There are some extra frequencies attached to various sites. Frequencies which are listed as transmit and receive together are simply listed as raw frequencies, i.e. 122.0500. If a frequency is listed as transmit only or receive only, a lowercase 't' or 'r' precedes the frequency. Most of those are operated in pairs, and are listed together. I believe the 400MHz repeater pairs are used for both crossband links to those areas/groups still using the 400MHz/MDMRS system, and for linking repeater sites from one area to another - you will often see one site transmit on 412.0 and receive on 423.0, and another adjacent site receive on 412.0 and transmit on 423.0. The one thing that I'm not certain about is the handful of sites which have extra VHF frequencies that are not listed as part of FireNet at this point - Moose Mountain is one site with such values. As I am literally only a kilometer from Moose, coincidentally, hopefully I'll be able to figure out what the deal is with this stuff fairly quick.

For what it's worth, the Calgary area is socked in with rain and high humidity, and I've heard XMC26 reporting the release of several aircraft, which I believe had been brought in from BC and Quebec.

 

[Heterodyne]

SRD issued a news release saying that the fire ban west of Calgary has been lifted.

Unfortunately, we're still under an extreme fire hazard warning. I actually heard some faint activity on the Fire Advisories channel today.... not much, but it was something

I saw a farmer's field burst into 2 acres of flame yesterday in Pincher Creek.... this place is D-R-Y

 

[Heterodyne]

I just got off the phone with an SRD information officer in Edmonton.... Apparantly the storm that rumbled through yesterday sparked a few fires west of the Crowsnest Pass, and northwest halfway between Elkford and the Pass.

I guess the huge litter of Helicopters camped out the Blairmore ranger station were good for something, because crews pounced on them right away, and they were knocked down before they could spread too far.

Before power was knocked out in our offices (I've really gotta get a portable scanner one of these days), I could hear the smoke reports coming in. After power came back on, one of the choppers was on the Fire Advisory channel asking if a Birddog was in the area.... The officer I spoke to wasn't sure if waterbombers were used or if the helitac teams did the work, but she's going to have a local information officer give me a call later, so maybe I can wrangle a visit to the fire sites.

That was some storm, though! The rain didn't bring down the fire hazard, though.