With ashes and smoke still hanging in the air, the Standing Buffalo Dakota First Nation is in shock after a grass fire ripped through the area Sunday afternoon.
Five houses and many hectares of land were destroyed by flames that reached 25 feet high. While four of the burned homes were vacant, the blackened ground shows just how close others came to the same fate.
“There were at least five houses with the fire burning right at the door,” Standing Buffalo Dakota First Nation Chief Rodger Redman recalled. “Just to get out of there was hard. It was scary, and to be in the middle of that smoke and fire was quite the thing.”
He went door-to-door urging people to evacuate, in one case, just in the nick of time.
“It was a matter of minutes. He didn’t have a chance to get anything of his belongings out. We tried to stop it, we were unsuccessful. It just came through,” Redman said.
The Fort Qu’Appelle Fire Department was at the scene of another blaze when the call came in around 2:15 pm. The Lipton and Standing Buffalo Fire Departments were first on the scene, while SaskPower turned off burning natural gas lines.
Roughly 40 residents also chipped in by releasing animals from their pens, evacuating children and battling the flames with anything they could.
“We had shovels, we had water packs, we had rakes. But when you’ve got a wall of flame coming at you, it’s hard to stop it with those types of methods,” Redman said. “We had singed hair, and thank god it was only that.”
After four hours fighting through flame, heat and smoke, the bulk of the fire was out.
“High fuel load and fairly high winds made it a challenge,” Fort Qu’Appelle Fire Chief David Sabirsh said. “We didn’t totally extinguish the fire. Some of the bushes were still burning, but we had fire guards put around them by a local farmer. They were contained and we didn’t think they were a threat anymore.”
The fire briefly reignited Monday afternoon, but was quickly beaten down by fire crews.
Thecause of the fire is still unknown, but Sabirsh says there were no controlled burns were registered in the area.
In the meantime, the man who lost his home is staying with family until the community can secure a new place for him to live.
While the grief and fear is still fresh, Chief Redman says there’s also relief no one was hurt.
He’s urging people to keep lawns cut and have emergency kits on hand with a long, dry summer ahead.