This week’s local history feature wraps up the look back at huge forest fires in the early days of the region.
Museum curator-director Karen Bachmann told us about the 1911 fire flattening the Porcupine mining camp, and the one five years later between Matheson and Cochrane. The next big one was in 1922, in the Haileybury-New Liskeard area.
“Because that was considered the county seat, where the courthouse was, where a lot of that stuff was happening,” Bachmann observes, “all of a sudden the province decided that maybe we should really be looking at how we fight fires.”
That led to the creation of a firefighting force, a group of experts, and other people who could help.
Bachmann says it became the textbook for all of Canada.
“So that long history in the development of the thought process around how are we going to get our heads around this was galvanized with that Haileybury fire, because that one was quite devastating for that area and it really took out some of the infrastructure for Northern Ontario at that point.”
Our interview that contributed to the last three weeks of features is posted below.