When Roger Gillingham’s pager went off on Aug. 3, he thought it would be a normal fire call.
It was one of many the North Shore Volunteer Fire Department received over the summer. Almost a dozen fires started in their jurisdiction from April to August, including one in Adam’s Cove that destroyed 12 homes.
“I don't think that as of Sunday afternoon that we thought it was going to go where it went,” Gillingham said.
But that sunny Sunday afternoon, the unthinkable happened — a fire in the woods that would lead to a month-long evacuation across nine communities.
The fire started in Kingston and burned for about three weeks in August. It burned over 10,000 hectares, spanning the 16 kilometres to Northern Bay, and torching nearly 200 homes.
“Monday it became clearer that this was going to be a bigger fire than we thought, and we needed to get people on the move,” Gillingham said.
They put calls into neighbouring towns, and soon a fire brigade of over a dozen volunteer departments were on the scene.
Gillingham joined the fire service in 1987, right out of university. And he became the fire chief of the North Shore Volunteer Fire Department in the early 2000s.
But with almost four decades of experience, he said the Kingston fire was something he’s never seen before.
“It was very evident that this was going to turn into a disastrous fire,” Gillingham said.
Teams of provincial and federal firefighters, along with water bomber operators and search and rescue teams would eventually join the ranks of first responders.
Schools in Victoria and Carbonear became sanctuary for hundreds of evacuees with nowhere else to go.
For weeks, communities of people were left to wonder just how bad the damage would be.
“We were seeing things happen in front of our eyes that we had absolutely no control over,” Gillingham said.
Standing inside that inferno is hard to describe.
It sounds like a wind blowing through the trees or being surrounded by crackling wood, he said. Every now and then you’d hear a propane tank valve get blown off.
Some members of his team even remember the soles of their bunker boots melting as they walked over hot rocks.
“We were seeing and we were hearing people's properties being destroyed,” Gillingham said.
Some of those homes belonged to the very people fighting the fires, their friends and families, or people on town council or local businesses.
A century old staple
Businesses like Jacobs Meats, a staple of 100 years in the community, were demolished.
The store sign sits untouched by fire on an empty lot. The sign wasn’t long up, Wayne Jacobs said.
He’s the owner of the store, inherited from his father Jim Jacobs, who, at 89, worked at the shop every day.
Jim has worked there since he was 16 years old.
Jim lives in Ochre Pit Cove, just a few minutes away from his son in Northern Bay.
And when they got the call to evacuate, Wayne remembers a hectic scene.
“With the traffic that was flying up and down the road … it was just crazy. Everyone was feared for their life,” Wayne said.
“Who would ever imagine that 20 days later, the fire is still burning? I mean … you wouldn't believe it. I mean, I couldn't believe it. No one could believe it.”
Wayne hoped that it was just wrong information.
And then came the hard part — telling his father.
“I don't think he wanted to believe it. And I didn't want to tell him, but I mean, we had no choice. It was what it was and that was it," said Wayne.
“It didn’t feel very good,” Jim said.
“I didn't think the meat shop was going to burn. I thought it would be there when I came back. But it wasn't. That takes the life out you for a while.”
And driving back up the shore for the first time wasn’t easy. Wayne said it took him half a dozen trips in and out to really comprehend the damage.
And now the days pass differently without the meat shop.
“For me and dad, that's the way it was,” Wayne said.
“I mean, we enjoy going to bed to get up, to go to work. Now if that's crazy, I guess I'm crazy. And He's 89. So I mean, he's a hard employee to get rid of.”
Wayne said he’s not sure what will happen with the business yet. He’ll wait for the spring to make a decision.
But Jim says he’s not ready to give it up yet.
“I'm all right for a while yet,” he said.
And while Jacobs Meats was lost in the fire, the Jacobs men say they're fortunate to have kept their homes.
“When you lose the house, you lose everything that you've had. I mean, some of these people only had 15 or 20 minutes to get out of there, so they couldn't take anything,” said Wayne.
Rebuilding, together
Gary and Norma Slade, a couple in their 70s, lost everything.
Their house stood on a lot next to Cabot Academy, where Gary worked for 35 years.
On the night they evacuated, they were watching the fire from the Noel’s Funeral Home parking lot, just up the road from their home.
Norma said they went home around 10:30 that night, and at 10:45 they got the call to leave.
“It was only then that I packed the bag, not realizing that it was going to be so close,” she said.
Cars and firefighters lined the street. Norma said she thought they’d only be gone for a couple of days.
“I thought it was joke, actually," Gary said. “I said, 'no way is the fire going to jump two rivers.'"
The couple stayed the first night with family in a neighbouring town. Then stayed with Norma’s brother in Holyrood. But, for a long time they took up residence at a school in Carbonear.
When they got the news that Cabot Academy was destroyed, Gary said he knew his house was gone, too.
But, It would be days before they got the official word that they no longer had a home to go home to.
“And that was the worst part,” Gary said.
When Gary and Norma were allowed back into the community, the familiar road home was no longer a welcomed sight.
“It was devastation,” Norma said.
And just buying another home isn’t as simple as it sounds.
“This is my home, this is my life,” Norma said. “This is it. I just can't give up on it. We worked all our lives, every check that we got went into that house.…We were comfortable in our own home.”
Their wedding pictures, keepsakes from Norma’s late mother, and Gary's tools are now gone.
Across the street is the house Norma grew up in, and her sister’s house beside that. Now, they see driveways that lead to empty lots.
The school playground is intact beside their house, but teams of dump trucks have carted out debris from where the school itself once stood, leaving behind an empty parking lot.
Gary and Norma have decided to rebuild, but the view from their window will be different.
“I really didn't want to come back because it was so disastrous looking and devastation everywhere,” Gary said.
“But now today, I do. We do feel a bit better now that the contractor got our house started. So hopefully we'll move forward.”
But as they see the burned trees and lots where houses used to be, Gary and Norma can’t help but think about the firefighters who had to be there for it all.
“It had to be so scary for them in such a fire,” Norma said.
Fire calls are more worrisome now
Gillingham was in the control room for most of the duration of the fire. But now, as he drives through the communities, he remembers parts of those nights.
“None of us ever experienced anything like that before,” he said. “We just faced a wall of fire and smoke coming to the community.”
“The landscape itself is scorched right from Perry’s Cove to Northern Bay."
Empty lots have replaced houses, burned trees line the roads and back country, all landmarks of the work the firefighters did for weeks.
“It's hard on the emotions,” Gillingham said, thinking back.
“It’s something that I think is going to stick with us for a long, long time.… I think that's common for first responders.”
That’s why, he said, the support first responders get at home is so important. He said without that support, it’s impossible to do the job.
Maureen Doyle-Gillingham has been that background support for the fire chief since he became a firefighter.
They got married in 1994, and since then, every time he leaves for a fire call, she reminds him to be careful and is there when he gets home.
But being on the sidelines isn’t an easy job for the ones left behind.
“For me, it was OK. It's another fire call, you know," she said, sitting at the breakfast bar in their kitchen.
“But it quickly escalated into something that was going to be bigger than what we as a family and as the fire department had been accustomed to.”
Their house survived the fire, but the woods surrounding it was scorched.
The call that seemed so run of the mill dragged on, and for much of that time Roger and Maureen were separated.
As was any firefighter in the evacuation zone.
“It's been an eye opener for sure,” she said. “This one was a little bit more unsettling as the days went by.”
In a string of communities so tight knit, it’s likely everyone knows someone in the fire service.
And everyone who returned home — some to a house to clean up and some to rubble — has to live with the reminder of what happened to their communities.
She said the effects are not only on the firefighting families, but anyone involved in the fires.
“It's almost overwhelming,” she said. “And you know, I've spoken to some wives and spouses and partners, and it's a worrisome day now when they get called away.”
But despite the late night pager calls, the time away from home, and the inherent danger in his line of work, she doesn’t doubt why her husband is in the fire service.
“We've been together for a long time,” she said. “And he's been a volunteer for a long time."
She said she’s proud of the work he’s done. And his reason for doing this work is pretty simple.
“I do it because I like to do it,” Roger said.
“We were able to do good,” he said. “And it was because of the joint efforts of so many volunteer fire departments that we were able to do so much good.”