Crews called out to tree fire in Stanley Park
Posted September 14, 2018 5:30 pm.
Last Updated September 14, 2018 9:13 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It was difficult to find, but crews were eventually able to pin point the exact location of a tree fire in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
Emergency crews first received a call from a pilot flying overhead around 4:00 p.m.
“The call was duplicated by many people from West Vancouver seeing a tree fire high above Second Beach,” explains Assistant Chief Kevin Wilson with Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services. “So we responded a full alarm assignment, and for 40 minutes we had crews out on trails and park rangers and mounted police staff on horses, and we were trying to identify.”
He says efforts to find the tree were made more difficult when smoke and flames diminished somewhat. Crews were able to locate the source after about 40 minutes.
“It’s, I believe, in the interior of the tree, a hollowed-type tree, so the flames start at the base and come up through the interior of the tree, and then makes its entrance high above the ground. So it’s very visible from elevated areas.”
Wilson says there are no fire hydrants around, and says it’s taken a lot of man power to get all the necessary equipment into the area.
“The hose streams can only reach so far, and we can’t bring an aerial in and we don’t have a helicopter with a large bucket to dump water on it so we have our lines laid, dragged into the bush, and we are changing water tips and working in the inside of the tree area.”
He adds his crews are structure-based, and says locating the fire as well as dragging hundreds of metres of lines in takes “considerable manpower.”
The fire did not spread to other trees in the area. There’s no word on what might have caused this blaze.
