Roots of History
The Gazette is digging into a different part of Sturgeon County’s history each month this year to commemorate the county’s centennial. Do you have a topic you want covered? Email [email protected] with your suggestions.
When a train sparked a grass fire last May 22 near Carbondale, Sturgeon County firefighters rolled out to fight it – just as they have for almost a century.
And Ted Suranyi was right behind them. He’s been retired as Namao’s fire chief for 16 years, but said he still gets the urge to chase the sirens.
“I’m too old now to go (help them), but I still support it,” he said.
But the way those crews fought the blaze was totally different from his day. Whereas he would have had a handful of volunteers and a leaky pumper truck at his disposal, these crews could call on ladder trucks, off-road units, and even aerial surveillance from multiple county fire departments.
“They had the drones out, and I could see the guys watching the fire!” Suranyi said.
Fire and those who fight it have been a part of Sturgeon County for centuries. Many of Sturgeon’s pioneering firefighters are still around today, ready to follow the sirens.
The first sparks
The first organized firefighters in Sturgeon were the North-West Mounted Police, who served as the region’s fire guardians as early as 1888, reports Black Robe’s Vision. Officers at the St. Albert detachment kept wet bags and fresh horses on hand to help beat out any blazes.This wasn’t that effective, as evidenced by the fact that large chunks of the county burned up prior to the 1920s. One of the biggest blazes was in 1889, where a months-long wildfire incinerated some 100 square miles of what is now the county and St. Albert.
“For weeks at a time, the inhabitants could all see a darkened sky and a reddish-coloured horizon,” writes historian Alice Trottier. Ash rained from above. The flames jumped the Sturgeon River and consumed much of the local Oblate farm, including a sawmill and a stable.
“A great trial!” Bishop Grandin wrote in his diary.
“I have literally mixed my bread with my tears.”
Morinville established the county’s first dedicated fire department in 1921 after a series of fires burned down a big chunk of Main Street, said Ron Cust, who has served with the town’s department since 1976.
Cust said this fire squad was not very effective, as it had a woefully under-powered fire pump – it’s that bathtub-sized tank on wheels out in front of the town’s current fire hall. In an ironic illustration of this, the town’s fire siren was one of the first structures destroyed when an inferno devoured almost an entire block of Morinville on June 20, 1940.
The town era
The town’s first modern fire department started in 1950 with the appointment of Leo Pelletier as chief, Cust said. The town organized a 22-man volunteer squad and bought a 1950 Dodge 3-ton fire truck for them to use. (That truck, since restored, is now a frequent sight at Morinville community events.)Prior to 1981, Morinville firefighters were called to action by a siren mounted atop an old windmill tower west of what is now the big vacant lot at 102 St. and 100 Ave.
“You could hear that all over town,” said Gilbert Boddez, who served with the Morinville department from 1964 to 1974. And it wasn’t just firefighters who responded – you typically got about half the town following the fire truck whenever they heard the siren.
“Everyone likes to go watch a fire,” Boddez explained.
“It’s exciting.”
Firefighters didn’t have their own gear in those days, Boddez said. Instead, you just grabbed whatever was available at the station, even if that meant clomping around in mismatched boots. For protection, you had a heavy coat, gloves and a helmet – that’s it. You typically didn’t have or use masks and oxygen tanks – you simply pulled back when you started coughing a lot – and had no safety line beyond the fire hose.
“We were just lucky that nobody really got hurt,” Boddez said.
Training was very basic, Boddez and Cust said, and happened for two hours each Wednesday. Cust recalled how one of his first lessons was how to jump onto the back of the fire truck as it was leaving the station.
“The ‘50s Dodge would really bounce,” he noted, so you had to learn how to bounce with it over the bumps.
Volunteers in Morinville, Gibbons, Bon Accord, Redwater, and (for a time) St. Albert were responsible for Sturgeon County’s fire protection prior to 1980.
County fires were challenging for many reasons, Cust said. Residents often waited a long time before calling for help, as they mistakenly believed they’d have to foot the bill and would try to put it out themselves. The fires were also often quite large, as farmers were allowed to burn off stubble in those days.
You also didn’t have reliable water or equipment. Morinville had a front-mounted pump on its truck in those days, and Cust remembers how it froze solid en route to a fire near Mearns. They had to thaw it out with a blowtorch.
On site, you had a mere 500 gallons in your truck with which to fight the fire, Cust said – a pittance compared to the 8,000 they can summon today. That meant frequent breaks to refill the tank, and clogged nozzles if they did so from a local dugout.
All this meant crews had no real way to stop wildfires, Cust said.
“You had to outsmart the fire,” he explained, which meant recruiting farmers to plow fire breaks and beating out what you could using wet sacks or paddles.
The county era
County residents started forming their own fire departments after a series of bad fires in the early 1980s. Calahoo was the first, established December 1980, followed by Namao two years later.Suranyi said he and other Namao residents started talking about forming a fire department because they were fed up with the amount of time Morinville needed to get to fires in their region. When his sister-in-law and her fiancé died in a house fire in Carbondale on July 1, 1982, it galvanized the community, and they quickly formed a volunteer squad headed by him. The county supplied them with a 1950s fire truck the Namao squad dubbed “Old Betsy.”
“The truck was in really poor shape,” Suranyi said – the hose was full of holes, the water tank leaked, and the brakes were so bad the water pressure in the hose actually pushed the truck backward.
The Namao fire department was initially housed out of Suranyi's auto repair shop next to Sturgeon Composite High School, which was convenient, as the department’s first fire happened at Sturgeon Composite that winter.
“The fire was a huge big crack in the ground,” he said, caused by a broken gas line under a trailer.
The Namao squad saved the structure, and the county provided them with a modern truck the next year. By 1984, they had a proper fire hall built by Johnny’s Store.
Sturgeon County started creating its own fire department in 1998 when it appointed Bart Clark as its first fire chief. Over the years that followed, the county took over administration of the Bon Accord, Calahoo, Legal, Namao, and Redwater fire departments for efficiency’s sake, said county fire chief Pat Mahoney.
Today, Sturgeon County has about 155 volunteer firefighters and about 30 pieces of firefighting equipment at its disposal. County-area fire departments now use a bevy of high-tech tools to stop fires and save lives, including all-terrain fire trucks, surveillance drones, infrared cameras, specialized foams, and even fire-extinguishing grenades.
But Mahoney said firefighters also have less time to act nowadays, as modern materials burn so much hotter and faster. Firefighters also have to handle medical calls, hazardous waste, industrial accidents, and car crashes in addition to structure fires, which require more training and equipment.
Crews now respond to about a thousand calls a year, compared to about 150 a year back in 1998, Mahoney said. That puts a lot on the backs of volunteers, which is why the county has started hiring full-time firefighters to lessen the load.
While he doesn’t wrangle a hose anymore, Boddez can still fit into his son Brad’s bunker gear, and said he still gets that urge to follow the sirens to a call.
“It kind of triggers a little adrenaline inside,” he said, no matter what your age.
“When it’s time to go, you kick the gears and you go.”
