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50 years later, Alberni logger recalls Taylor River fire

Flames consumed 6,000 acres of timber
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Two men, one holding a fire hose, stand among burned stumps and bushes near Taylor Arm. The water from the hose is being sprayed towards some of the stumps. Smoke lingers in the background. circa 1967. AV MUSEUM PHOTO PN09434 / PATRICK POWER PHOTO

Barbara was 12 years old and enjoying a leisurely cruise on Sproat Lake with family members when all of a sudden, smoke appeared to the west, at the end of Taylor Arm—one of four arms that make up Sproat Lake in the Alberni Valley.

“I remember the smoke mushroomed into the sky,” she said.

News that the 50th anniversary of the ‘Tay River’ fire was coming up Aug. 16 brought the memories flooding back for Barbara, who declined to share her last name.

“It was getting dark,” she said, even though it was the middle of the afternoon. “We weren’t the only boat there; it was almost like people at that end of the lake started slowing their boats to talk to one another (about the fire).

“I remember we could feel the heat even though we weren’t close,” she recalled. “We began to notice it was feeling hot and decided it was time to turn around.”

The fire started at 2:40 p.m. when a blast from a Windsor Construction Co. crew, tasked with rebuilding the Alberni-Tofino road (not yet a highway), dislodged a rock that knocked over a BC Hydro power pole. When the live wires from the pole came in contact with the tinder-dry ground, the fire quickly ignited. An account in the Twin Cities Times from Aug. 23, 1967, seven days after the fire started, noted the blaze cut through 5,000 acres (approx. 2,600 hectares) in less than a week.

Severe hot, dry weather had forced forestry closures all over the west coast, which was still feeling the effects of a record fire season in 1961 (3,102 fires raged across the province that year, according to news reports), including Sproat Lake Division.

READ: Final report on Taylor River Fire (1967)

Logger Jack James was one of hundreds of MacMillan Bloedel employees called in to help fight the fire, which threatened its tree farm licence. James said it was the worst fire he ever fought in his 50-year logging career.

“I was there the first night,” said James, who was a fire boss with M&B’s Cameron Division at the time. He lives in Port Alberni now. “By the time I got there she was up the hill going toward Kennedy Lake and she was really going. She got up to the top of the trees and crowned,” he said.

(Crowning is the term for a fire that jumps from treetop to treetop.)

“I’d never heard anything like it. It was like cases of gunpowder going up.

“It was right on top of the trees going up the hill, and there was nothing we could do that night.”’

James’s wife Donna was returning to Port Alberni from Qualicum Beach with her parents, visiting from Alberta, and when she rounded Cameron Lake she could see the smoke from Taylor Flats, 40 kilometres away.

“I said, oh oh, Jack won’t be home,” Donna James said. She drove her parents to the Fish and Duck Inn on Faber Road to see if they could glimpse the fire, and they arrived just as a Martin Mars waterbomber dropped a load of water onto the fire.

“It looked like an atom bomb,” she said.

Jack James and his crews fought the fire for the next two weeks, often working 12-hour shifts and longer. He and a crew of about 200 were sent to Snow Creek, where they put up a fire trail—a cleared swath eight or nine feet wide, that was designed to starve the fire line of fuel.

“We cleared all the brush; we had to go down to dirt,” James recalled. “We used shovels, power saws, everything. Then I got an International Cat (machinery) and pulled it up a 52 percent grade backwards, along an old skidder setting.

“I told the cat operator to drop the blade and head for the lake.” They cleared out everything, from brush to stumps.

At one point, James said he could see the fire advancing a mile at a time.

“We thought we’d lost the town (Port Alberni),” he said. “They were getting ready to evacuate.”

Accounts of the fire in the book Sproat Lake Reflections noted smoke filled the Alberni Valley for two weeks.

Flames destroyed the Taylor River Bridge, and the west coast communities of Tofino and Ucluelet were cut off for four days until a Bailey bridge could be brought in.

Power wasn’t restored to the west coast for the same amount of time.

The fire burned out of control for 16 days, but wasn’t officially out, according to news reports, until Oct. 10, 1967.

Fire crews used 35 miles of fire hoses to try and extinguish the fire; the Martin Mars waterbombers made a total of 286 drops over 150 flying hours in an attempt to control flare-ups (it was too hot and smoky for the waterbombers to fly at the beginning of the fire, according to an account in Sproat Lake Reflections).

Twenty years after the fire, an article in the MacMillan Bloedel ‘MB Journal’ noted that it had taken that long for the area to become green again.

James said if you know where to look, you can still see evidence of the fire, five decades later.

editor@albernivalleynews.com

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Jack James of Port Alberni spent 50 years logging in the bush all over the west coast of B.C. He retired from his JJ Logging’s Oldtime Logging Show at McLean Mill in June 2017. SUSAN QUINN PHOTO
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A burned stump sits among small bushes and young trees near Taylor Arm. Other burned debris lies on the ground. Power lines and a pole are in the centre on this photo. circa 1967. AV MUSEUM PHOTO PN09435 / PATRICK POWER PHOTO
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A man wearing a hard hat is seen at the side of the road preparing a fire hose, which is hooked up to a fire truck parked on the road, during the Taylor River Fire in August 1967. AV MUSEUM PHOTO PN09439


Susie Quinn

About the Author: Susie Quinn

A journalist since 1987, I proudly serve as the Alberni Valley News editor.
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