Spring Alert: Forest Fires Kill

After what seems to have been a long and cold (it was a long and cold) winter, they’re already predicting a long, hot and dry summer. The new norm, we’re warned by environmental scientists.

Darn.

Which means that we’re coming up to that time of year when, years ago, the firefighting water bombers stationed at Pat Bay (Victoria International) Airport entered their working-up period in readiness for another fire season.

How I loved listening to those multi-engine prop planes, many of them dating from the Second World War.

Much like the difference between a steam whistle and a diesel locomotive, a purring multi-piston radial engine is music to the ear when compared with a jet’s shrieking exhaust.

Having grown up beside the CNR tracks in Victoria and having lived for 20 years at Cherry Point, Cobble Hill, here in the Cowichan Valley, I’ve been doubly blessed in my exposure to the soothing sounds of both steam engines and propeller-driven aircraft.

It was a seasonal highlight when, usually mid- to late spring morning in the late ‘70s, I’d hear the distinctive drone of an approaching Canso PBY.

It meant that it was that time of year when the Sidney-based Flying Firemen were preparing for another forest fire season by tuning up and test flying their planes.

I’d stop whatever I was doing and step outside my office to watch the Second World War amphibian’s lumbering low-level approach from the east. I could see every detail of its undercarriage as it passed almost directly overhead. In fact, I can still see it and hear the powerful roar of its twin engines in my mind.

As I can see in my mind’s eye that hot Sunday evening of July 16, 1967. My friend Dave and I had spent the weekend digging bottles in Cumberland’s Chinatown. (See also: ‘Vancouver Island’s Great Forest Fire of August 1938,’ ‘You’ll Never Forget Fighting a Forest Fire Firsthand’). We were coming home when we encountered bumper-to-bumper traffic, then absolute bottleneck, at the northern approach to the Malahat.

Nobody was moving in either direction. We didn’t need a radio to tell us why, we could see and smell the smoke from the fire that had erupted earlier that day on the western slopes of Goldstream Park’s Skirt Mountain.

What we didn’t initially know was the horrific consequence that had occurred but hours before.

As hundreds of spectators had watched from the Island Highway, Super Canso water bomber CF-FFX, after making several passes at the flames with water scooped from Saanich Inlet, had crashed. Killed were Flying Fireman Co. president and pilot, Alex M. Davidson, and his co-pilot, R.T. ‘Paddy’ Moore. Both men died instantly after their plane clipped a tree in the dense smoke and careened into the mountainside.

It took several days and the aid of a Martin Mars water bomber to bring the blaze under control.

A tragedy under any circumstances, it seemed all the more for these airmen. Owner of the plane Davidson, 43, who left a wife and two children, had had a distinguished career as a test pilot of Hurricanes and Spitfires during the Second World War. After piloting for Fairey Aviation, the company that had converted the famous Martin Mars to water bombers, he’d founded the Flying Firemen Ltd. with two converted wartime PBY-SA Cansos, based at Pat Bay Airport.

Ironically, he wasn’t supposed to be flying that day but, shortly before takeoff, had filled in for pilot Tom Swanson.

Swanson’s reprieve was short-lived—just a year later, he and engineer Tom Worley were killed in a similar accident in the Sooke Hills. (In May 1978 a third Flying Fireman Canso went down, killing its two-man crew, at Snow Lake, MB, and the company suffered two further casualties, at Sioux Lookout, ON in July 1981, and at Thunder Bay, ON in May 1984.)

Davidson’s co-pilot during the Skirt Mountain fire and fellow veteran, 42-year-old Paddy Moore, had earned a Distinguished Service Cross in the Pacific and had also served in peacetime as a test pilot.

Their deaths followed by six years the crash of one of the pioneering Martin Mars water bombers on Mt. Moriarty which took the lives of its four-man crew, W. Richmond, 45, W. Wiggins, 37, J. Edwards, 42, and R. Morin, 42.

All were wartime veterans of the RCAF; all were family men.

The company, no longer in business, had phased out its surviving Cansos (several of which, at last report, survive around the world) in favour of more modern aircraft by the early ‘80s.

In 2010,, near Lytton, two more air tanker pilots, Tim Whiting, 58, of Langley, with three decades’ flying experience, and Brian Tilley, 36, of Edmonton, died in the crash of their 1950s Convair 580 as they were about to drop chemical fire retardant on a newly-sparked fire in the Fraser Canyon area. It was Conair’s first fatal accident in almost 20 years, although the company has had several non-fatal accidents during that time, and it was the second forest-fire-related crash in a week…

I began this ramble with warm and fuzzy recall of those mornings in the ‘70s when I had so much enjoyed watching those firefighting Cansos pass over my office at Cherry Point. But there’s nothing warm and fuzzy about our continuing and increasingly hot and dry summers and their resulting wildfires of ever greater consequence. summer’s reality. Meaning that, again soon be with us into September, at least.

We can’t prevent lightning strikes, but we can be on our best behaviour, not just in the woods, but wherever there’s a chance of fire. It’s the least we can do for our forests, for ourselves, for those heroic pilots who have died in the line of duty, for those pilots who continue their dangerous work, and for the men and women doing their part on the ground.

So let’s be careful out there!

Other posts of interest

See also:

Great Forest Fire of August 1938
Forest Ranger Oliver G. Clark Died in the Line of Duty
You'll Never Forget Fighting a Forest Fire Firsthand