Firefighters in Halifax struggled to fight the 2023 Tantallon wildfire because their department isn’t equipped to deal with large scale forest fires.
The department is built to put out structural fires in buildings, said Chief Ken Stuebing.
“I’m a structural firefighter and we are a structural fire department, and this concern is being felt right across the world, that structural fire departments are being asked to respond and are in fact responding to incidents historically they have not responded to,” said Stuebing.
Stuebing outlined some key take-aways from the fire department’s post-incident analysis report for the 2023 Tantallon wildfire to the city council’s Committee of the Whole on Tuesday.
The review only covered the actions and response from the Halifax Fire Department and not any other emergency response group.
The Tantallon fire started on May 28, 2023 and lasted about three weeks, forcing more than 16,000 people to evacuate. It destroyed 151 homes and burned more than 900 hectares of land.
Stuebing said part of the problem with the department’s response was the area where the fire happened. Many of those neighbourhoods border large areas of forest, which the department isn’t as equipped to deal with.
The firefighting techniques for forest areas are different, but they also require different resources, like water bombers, he said.
The report, which was previously released to the city council, outlined 13 areas of improvement, including crating a major event response plan.
