Fort McMurray May 2016

   

I’ve wanted to write about this story for awhile, but have never got around to it.

  Back in May of 2016, I was working for an air service that provided fixed wing Air Ambulance service on contract for the Government of Alberta. Since Canada has Universal Healthcare, air ambulance service is provided by the governemnt, at no cost to the person requiring the service. Sometimes the service is required because the doctor, clinic or hospital that provides a specialized service is not in the city where the patient lives and other times it is because the person lives in a remote location where even general, basic health care isn’t available at all. The government actually needs to centralize a lot of specialized services as its often more cost effective to simply bring patients to a facility, rather than try to build facilities or provide those services in remote areas or areas where the population density simply isn’t there. In a country as large and sparsely populated as Canada, this actually makes a lot of sense. A couple of million dollars in increased transport costs to bring the patients to the service is a lot cheaper than building a hospital in the middle of nowhere.

  At that time, there was 12 fixed wing air ambulances, mostly King Air 200’s, spread out across the province in eight different bases. This pretty much put an air ambulance plane within an hours flight of anywhere in the province. In a couple of the bases, there would be 2 aircraft. Oddly enough, those bases would be the ones with the least amount of population. It seems counter intuitive, till you realize that the higher the population of the area, the more healthcare resources would be built in that area, meaning that patients wouldn’t have to be transported by Air Ambulance to access those resources.

  There were also rotary wing air ambulance resources scattered in a similar fashion, I believe, but to be honest, I don’t know very much about that side of things. Helicopters are weird and so are the people who fly them. 

  I was on-call as a First Officer. Each Aircraft “ team “ was made up of the Captain, a First Officer and two flight medics. I never could keep straight the hierarchy or rank/skill level of the medics. There were Flight Nurses, Paramedics, Medics, Advanced Life Support Medics, Basic Life Support Medics, Respiratory specialists, Neonatal Intensive Care Medics, Pediatric Intensive Care Medics, and likely even more designations. I “ think “ our base had a Flight Medic and a Paramedic. One Jedi Master and One Apprentice assigned to each team. The pilots lived in town in their own accommodation and the medics either lived in their own housing or in the company provided housing if they were rotational.

  We had two planes at our bases and I think I was on team 2, which meant that if we got a call, it went to team 1 first, bumping me up onto the next-available call. On Team 2, with 2 planes, it wasn’t hair-trigger readiness, but you still had to be prepared for the possibility that there would be two dispatches in short order, or occasionally, even on the same call, say for example a car crash with multiple patients needing transport. 

  On Team 1, you didn’t go grocery shopping as you’d have to abandon your cart and walk briskly to the exit. On team 2, you could probably get away with it, but you you had to consider it as a possibility.

  I think we got the call around suppertime, it was just getting dark as my phone went off with the alarming Klaxon ringtone that Alberta health had programmed into the government issued phones. It was a good decision to use those ringtones, that little extra shot of adrenaline likely made you move a little quicker, just out of panic.

  Our response time per our contract with the Government was that we would be wheels up within 30 minutes of accepting a dispatch. I’ve talked about this before, but basically, they give you a short window to evaluate and give an answer on whether or not you could accept the trip. They’d give you the basic details of the call, origin, destination, number of patients and/or escorts and a Red/Yellow/Green designation as to severity. If there was other information that was relevant to the decision if we could accept the dispatch, like altitude/pressure requirements, they’d also let you know.

  The time to evaluate the trip had no set limit, but it was generally accepted that you provide a go or no-go within 10-15 minutes or you called them back and let them know why you needed more time. 

  Sometimes you might have to call ahead to a remote airport and see if they could provide runway-clearing or condition reports before you committed to the flight. This often involved waking people up in the middle of the night to drive down to the airstrip to tell you if it was useable or not, and if clearing was required, how long that would take. I often felt bad for these folks. They all got paid extra for after hours call-outs, but there were lots of times where you’d make all these calls and have people out there clearing runways at 3 AM, only for something to change on the medical side and the trip get cancelled. They still got paid, but I’m sure it still felt a little unsatisfying, to do all that for nothing.

  Once you’ve looked at everything and made all your calls, 90% of the time you’d be calling them back and “ accepting “ the trip. 

  There are lots of reasons for not accepting a trip and it was often a bit of a touchy subject in the regular pilot meetings. Management and the owner of course, would very much like you to accept the trip. No Trippy No Money. On the other hand, they had a bit of a tight rope to walk. They had to be careful in not coming across as “ pressuring” pilots to take trips that they shouldn’t be doing. In my experience, it was actually the pilots that needed to stop pressuring themselves to take these trips and management would occasionally have to “pressure” the pilot to not accept the trip.

  King Air Medevac jobs, at the time that this occurred, was an intermediate entry level job. You had to have some commercial flying experience to get a job flying Medevac, but not very much. The province mandated 500 hours of flight time for a First Officer and 2000 hours flight time for a Captain position. These minimums have changed over time, both increasing and decreasing, mostly due to pilot hiring markets and their ability to get candidates when they needed them. In times of job shortages, your resume stack would grow considerably and you could afford to set minimum standards high and still have a large number of resumes. In times of Pilot shortage, that pile got small enough that your minimums may reduce that pile to….gone.  

  When I got hired as an FO, things were just starting to heat up in the pilots favor, hiring was picking up briskly due to the success and expansion of Westjet and Air Canada’s regional operations, Encore and Jazz. Their demands for pilots had shrunk their pile down to the point that they were lowering hiring requirements pretty dramatically. 5 years prior to this, it took 3000 hours to get your resume noticed at an outfit like Jazz, now they were looking for 500-1000 hours depending on who you asked. This pulled a lot of the guys out of circulation for medevac-level jobs as they were simply using those jobs as a stepping stone to get to Jazz. I got hired with 1000 hours, as an FO and could look forward to 2-3 years flying as an FO to get to the 2000 hours that the contract required for me to hold a Captain Position. A year later, they were quietly dropping those requirements and “finding” things in your background that would lend a case to applying for a variance and getting the minimums lowered, just for you. When I got my upgrade to captain I think I had just a little aver 1600 hours.

  Pilots with less than 2000 hours, in my opinion, are more apt to put pressure on themselves to make the trip, versus management putting pressure on them. Anxious to prove themselves or to look better/more capable in the eyes of their peers was more of a danger than is given enough credit.

  That all being said, the King Air is a very capable airplane, often sold and promoted as an “ all weather “ airplane. There really isn’t such a thing, as all-weather would include tornados and hail storms, conditions that no airplane in existence has the capability to fly in. It can handle icing conditions very well and is usually equipped with all the bells and whistles for instrument flight, so all weather? no. Most-weather? Heck yes.

  In accepting or dealing a trip, the basic rule of thumb was that if the weather was legal to fly in, that the regulations allowed for you to dispatch in those conditions, then you were expected to accept. If you declined a trip and the weather was legal, you’d be explaining your reasons to the chief pilot in the morning, if not 10 minutes later when he/she got a call from the dispatch center. Trip declines were actually pretty rare.

  That’s not to say that there aren’t valid reasons for turning down a trip even when it was legal to go. It’s also not unreasonable to be asked to justify that decision to your employer. That’s why the captain gets the big bucks, haha.

  Long story short, on that night in early may of 2016 the weather was perfectly fine, nothing that would keep the captain I was paired with from accepting the trip. In fact, on that night, every single medevac airplane on contract with the Alberta Government had all received the same call asking for a “ weather check “ on the exact same trip. 

  They called these events a Mass Casualty Event. In this case it was a wildfire that had encroached on the town limits of Fort McMurray and the town was in the midst of being over run by the fire, they had made the call to evacuate the entire town of roughly 120,000 people.

  Earlier in the day, they had decided that the fire didn’t look like it was going to threaten the town and I guess conditions changed rapidly. The call to evacuate was a sudden call and caught a lot of people off guard.

  The majority of the people who were told to evacuate simply grabbed a few belongings, threw them and their families in their pickup trucks and hit the road, heading south on the single highway that led out of McMurray, down towards Edmonton and all the small communities in between.

  Actually, that’s not quite correct, there is another highway that leads north out of McMurray, but that’s not in the direction of any towns, it just leads to the private work camps and sites of the Oil Sands facilities. In the rush to evacuate, the highways and town streets became clogged with panicked residents. Grid lock ensued and their tons of videos of people trying to flee with the flames beside them on the road, embers falling on their cars, people driving across lawns. I think that’s part of the reason that a few thousand people actually went North instead of South and ended up at the gates of the privately owned oil-field camps.

  I actually think the oil sands companies didn’t get near enough credit  for their part in helping during this evacuation. The camps that were north of the city had private air strips for flying in their rotational workers and accommodation facilities for feeding and housing a couple thousand workers at a time. When the evacuees showed up at their door step, they took the initiative to call in their airline vendors who did their flying and told them, “ send all the planes now, we’re sending half our staff home, tonight. “. On their own dime, they emptied out their camps and made room to feed and house the evacueees, shut down their operations and incurred all the expenses of that, plus that of sending 1000 workers home in the middle of the night on any plane they could get their hands on.

 Those were the people that could grab their keys and run. The residents of the hospital, the senior citizen homes, among others, needed some help.

  I was very impressed with the province and the planning that they actually had in place for an event like this. There were literally several Sea Cans stashed in town that had basically a mobile field hospital and disaster response equipment in them. On an hour or two’s notice, this equipment was taken ( or was already at ) to the airstrip equipment hangar at the FireBag Airport, the private airstrip that serviced Suncors massive oil sands project. The large hangar was quickly converted to a field hospital, with beds, triage and staging areas, workers with vests and radios, desks, computers. Every bus in the city was pressed into service emptying out the old age homes and the hospital, bringing them to FireBag and processing them through the hangar and onto waiting planes. Ambulatory patients would be tagged for the regional Jets and smaller airliners, taking them to Calgary and Edmonton. Stretcher bound patients would be assessed for their in-flight medical care needs and paired up with an appropriately qualified medical team and the medevac plane waiting outside, for similar transport. Emergency beds for patients, and evacuees were being opened up around the province and people were being assigned a place to sleep even before they got processed through the hangar. Very impressive, to say the least!

  On our end, we got the call to get moving as quickly as we could, fly to FireBag and expect to be busy for the rest of the night, shuttling people down to Edmonton and Calgary.  

  FireBag airport is owned by Suncor and was basically designed to handle 2-3 planes at a time. 737s and CRJ regional jets were the most common plane they’d use. I assume on an operation as big as theirs, with a couple thousand workers on site, they’d have crew changes pretty much every day, as 3 737 aircraft will only handle about 350 people roughly. That night, they were going to try and move upwards of a thousand workers to make room for the fleeing residents of Fort McMurray, as well as the several hundred occupants and residents of the care homes and the hospital.

  Needless to say, that airstrip was operating way above capacity. Operating might even be a bit of a nice was to put it as well, controlled chaos would be more like it. When we landed on our first trip into FireBag, there was a line up of aircraft that had landed, cleared the runway onto the only taxiway and were basically held there, in a lineup, waiting for room to free up on the ramp to give us a place to park. The ramp, designed to hold 3 airliners, now held upwards of a dozen, shoehorned into every available inch of real estate. On top of that, off on the side of the ramp, away from the terminal building, was another half dozen king Airs and a couple Beech 1900s of the medevac providers.

  It was a good move to shut the ramp down and hold us, as the chaos and irregular operations, at night, on a crowded ramp, could have easily turned into something worse. We ended up sitting there for almost a half hour before they were able to shuffle a few planes around and make a hole for us to park.

  All the while, sitting there on the taxiway with our engines running, were watching airliners land on the runway behind us and similarly, clear the runway and line up behind us. By the time they moved a few of us onto the ramp, I could see that the last plane leaving the runway had just enough room to park on the taxiway and that was it, the next plane to land would not be  able to clear the runway and the whole airport would be gridlocked. I could see the lights of two more planes on approach in the clear night sky.

  Once onto the ramp, we shut down and got out, joining the huddle of coworkers and colleagues of other air service companies, all exchanging info about what was going on. We were eventually instructed to give our cell number to a coordinator and go inside the terminal and await our assignment of patient and destination. 

  I know I said it above, but it really needs to be repeated. Somewhere in your city there is a disaster management team that likely works for your town/city/province/state or regional emergency agency. Those people sit around and daydream ( in a good way ) about things like this. They’re likely paid fairly well and have a decent sized budget to buy things that never get used and make plans for things that never happen. They’re probably easy targets for budget cuts or political finger pointing. On a night like this one, I was in awe of what was going on around us. The equipment that was in place, the people that were filling roles and organizing things, it’s no accident that it was going as well as it was. 

  Inside the terminal, made for the oil workers to await their rides to and from work, there were some plastic chairs to sit on, bathrooms, and a pallet, literally, of snacks and bottled water. No time for niceties like tables, cutlery, glasses or hot food. Simply a pallets of boxes of cookies and potato chips as well as drink boxes of juice and bottles of water. Plunk it down in the middle of the lobby and move on. Blood sugar needs could be tended to by anyone walking by.

  It didn’t take long before we got our first customers. Most of the patients were low-acuity, meaning they needed little in the way of medical care encountered, they simply were unable to walk on or off the airliners that were alongside us, filling up with anyone who could walk on and did not require medical monitoring or care enroute.

  Two stretcher patients, one escort, two medics and a dog, that was our first load and off we went to take them to Edmonton.

  Taking off from Firebag you’d fly right over the top of the town of Fort McMurray, which was now actively burning as the fire chewed right through entire subdivisions. Overhead, there wasnt a lot to see at night, other than the black smoke “ shadows “ that blocked out the streetlights as you passed over. 

  The municipal firefighters kept up the fight as long as they could, but eventually had to pull back and I think eventually they were waved off completely. The power and streetlights stayed on as the fire moved from house to house, but the fire was way too active for the firefighters to safely do much other than pull back. I tried to get some pictures as we flew over, but they didn’t really turn out very well in the poor lighting. 

  It was just under an hours flight down to Edmonton and the route that you flew over roughly paralleled the straight line of the main prairie highway below us. Clearly visible from 24,000 feet as a line of red tail lights for well over two hundred kilometers as evacuating traffic inched along, 80,000 people out for a nights drive to the big city.

  I think I remember hearing that out of all the chaos and panic of that afternoon and night, there was only one fatality. Some unfortunate person was run over at a gas station, jammed with cars and trucks, at night.

 We managed to get three trips I think, before we “ duty-ed “out in the early AM and no longer had any allowable hours left by regulation. We passed the torch to the next team and I think they kept going for much of the next day. 

  In Edmonton, they were equally prepared. Similar sea-cans, stuffed with make-shift stretchers were unloaded into the giant Alberta Health Hangar, transforming it from an airplane garage into a massive hospital room. Airplanes unloading their cargo on the ramp outside and blasting off to go back for more, staff getting patients processed inside. Either off to a local hospital, care-home bed, school gymnasium or collected by relatives.

 The fire was front page news for a couple months, along with all the success stories of the evacuation. There were a few stories, mostly politically motivated about different mistakes that were made or were shown as mistakes in the clear light of day from someone’s armchair days later. In the middle of the night, with all of the pressure and confusion going on, I’m simply amazed that as few mistakes were made.

  3 or 4 months later I got an envelope from the Province of Alberta. Inside was a letter from the premier of Alberta, a Certificate of Appreciation and a little Medallion? Coin? Commemorating the event. 

  Somewhere on the desk of one of those disaster planning people, even this little detail was something to be planned for, delegated to and written up in a binder, placed on a shelf and hopefully never pulled down.