A prescribed fire that jumped Highway 16, burned 100 hectares at the Jasper airstrip and created enough smoke to shut down traffic for four hours was never out of control, according to Jasper National Park officials. 

On Tuesday, May 3, while fire management specialists actioned a 300-hectare prescribed burn at Henry House Flats, 13 kms northeast of the Jasper townsite on the north side of Highway 16, the wind came up and caused embers from the main fire to ignite grasslands at the Jasper airstrip on the south side of the highway.

The resulting smoke was thick enough to obscure visibility and trigger the Incident Commander, with help from the RCMP, to close the highway. However, at no point was the public or public assets ever in danger, said JNP Resource Conservation Manager Dave Argument.

“We anticipated spotting as a potential risk and had adequate resources to deal with it when it occurred,” he said.

What fire management specialists did not predict was the amount of smoke produced and the direction that smoke would take. 

“We anticipated a fairly large smoke plume but it’s difficult to predict where exactly it will shift,” Argument said.

Motorists were stopped at approximately 2 p.m. while smoke billowed over Highway 16. Eastbound and westbound traffic on Highway 16 remained at a standstill until approximately 5:30 p.m., when one lane of alternating traffic was opened. Police and Jasper National Park warden vehicles escorted motorists through the area of restricted visibility. 

“We anticipated a traffic delay [but] people were held up longer than we had hoped,” Argument said.

Jasper’s Mike Donnelly was on his way back from Hinton at 2:30 p.m. when he came to a long line of static cars and transport trucks at Morro Peak, approximately 25 kilometres east of Jasper. He was held up for approximately three hours. He said there was no communication from officials indicating what the delay was about or how long it would be. He watched as helicopters flew overhead, en route to the Jasper airstrip, where they were bucketing the spot fires. Down the road, initial attack crews ensured the grassfire was being held as they mopped, beat and hosed down the flare-ups that otherwise could have put some of the airstrip assets at risk. 

“There will be a lot of green grass soon,” Donnelly laughed.

In fact that’s exactly the idea with a prescribed burn.

Argument said the Henry House Flats project was designed to help restore grassland ecosystems to Jasper National Park. Grasslands are important valley bottom habitat for ungulates, birds and rare plant types, he said, and have been pushed out by the monoculture lodgepole pine forest, a trend which has been exacerbated by the government’s long history of removing fire from the landscape.

“The idea is to rejuvenate the pine forest and to restore this grassland ecosystem that historically covered a much larger area of the Athabasca River Valley,” Argument said. 

Those goals were met and notwithstanding the highway delays, fire management specialists are pleased with the outcome, Argument said. The Henry House burn had been planned for three years, pushed back because of travel and group movement restrictions brought on by the COVID pandemic. When the project finally came into prescription—meaning the weather, humidity and moisture levels in the soil and vegetation were conducive to burning and removing the coarse, woody debris and standing dead wood in the area—Jasper National Park put its two initial attack crews on the ground and brought in a third from Mount Revelstoke National Park. Additional resources included three helicopters, a water tanker truck and various sprinklers and other fire fighting equipment.

Argument said the team had adequate resources to ensure the burn could be controlled if it did spot over the highway. When it did, although it burned approximately 100 hectares on the airstrip, there was never any danger to the public, he said. 

“When it boils down this had a longer than anticipated impact on traffic on the highway,” Argument said. “We didn’t hope for it to spot, but we planned for it.”

Environment Canada put out an air quality statement for Jasper at 4:53 p.m. on May 3, advising the public of the smoke. That advisory was ended today (May 4) at 7:55 a.m.

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com