65 fire trucks from as far away as Vancouver Island are parked at a command centre that has been set up by the Office of the Fire Commission in the parking lot of a local Vanderhoof high school.
The centre is operating 24 hours with crews working up to 12 hour shifts; which may be reduced to 8 hour shifts, three times per day. Crew members are sleeping on mats on the floors of classrooms.
The command centre relocated from Echo Lake Bible Camp yesterday, August 16.
“This makes it easier to to go north of Fort St. James and support operations there, as well as Fraser Lake and Burns Lake,” Tim Armstrong, Incident Commander for the Office of the Fire Commissioner (OFC) said.
Crews are responding to a number of different fires in all three of the fire zones. Those that left the command centre this morning, August 17, went to Fraser Lake.
The OFC is tasked with controlling all municipal fire department assets and all requests for assets that come out of this command centre.
“As resources are requested, we assemble crews into task forces and move them into the areas,” Armstrong said. “Some of them integrate with the B.C. Wildfire and some operate as structure protection specialists that look after residences. The OFC looks after towns and B.C. Wildfire cares for the forest.”
