Colby Cosh: CFB Wainwright and the Old Testament dangers of Prairie fire

On Saturday, I was out and about on foot in Edmonton, a little after noon, when a very unusual windstorm whipped through the streets. It was a dry day, very warm for October; I wasn’t dressed for bad weather and had left my apartment with no reason to expect any, although once I got home, I saw that there had been an official wind alert.

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It is rare for me, as a lifelong inhabitant of the area, to experience discomfort and fear at being caught in the open, or even to think of “being caught in the open.” But this was my experience Saturday afternoon; I was scrambling between stores, found that my destination had gone out of business and had the specific thought, “Dammit! I’m in trouble.” That wind was heavy with dust and small rocks, and had a multidirectional, unpredictable stabbing violence to it. It felt personal. I found cover at a McDonald’s, dawdled a bit over fries and a shake and went home when the worst of the storm had passed, not thinking about it much.

And, of course, in the evening, further east, reports began to emerge of an unspeakable tragedy that seems to have been caused largely by that same prairie wind. Social-media grapevines hinted at a catastrophe with hundreds of casualties, and it was natural to leap to terrible conclusions. CFB Wainwright is, for the most part, a training and teaching facility for infantry and armour exercises; it is close to an adjoining town and is not a place where you would expect high explosives or even volatile fuels to be stored or used in gigantic quantities. It is dotted with defunct natural-gas wells, but these are mapped with great precision and entombed carefully. The Forces know they’re there and conduct live-fire exercises as a matter of routine, knowing they’re there.

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This didn’t stop rumour-mongers from stating flatly that the disaster had involved both munitions and natural gas. Some people invented stories that would be convincing if you knew nothing at all about CFB Wainwright, and if you did know something about it, the uncertain scale of the incident couldn’t help but leave you wondering about alternative scenarios involving terror or lone-nut violence.

Military officials are now speaking of a small grass fire, perhaps related to exercises in progress, and of having continued with an infantry operation, not expecting the arrival of that uncanny windstorm. A weapon may have started the fire, but under those conditions a cigarette could have done the trick just as well. Four soldiers are dead and 39 more are in hospital — enough to strain the burn-unit resources of two provinces to the extreme (and for a long time, probably).

We will know more about this heartbreaking misadventure as it is investigated. Even in information-averse Canada there is too much at stake for the slo-mo foot-dragging one might otherwise be expecting. You can see the conspiracy theories lumbering down the Facebook-Twitter road toward us already. But if you’re an older person who grew up on the plains, you will have been explicitly taught about the Old Testament dangers of prairie fire; you may have heard stories of homesteaders desperately digging firebreaks, and may have heard them from the mouth of someone who held a shovel a time or two.

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