The tide has turned in the fight against a large grass fire out at Good Spirit Lake as the focus now shifts to putting out hot spots.
The fire had started around 10:30 Saturday morning (May 16) according to Canora RCMP, which resulted in poor air quality and reduced visibility and drivers being advised to avoid the Good Spirit Lake area along Highway 229, the Tiny Grid Road and Sandy Beach.
Mounties estimated at the time approximately 12-hundred acres had burned, but Fire Chief of the Canora Fire Department, Devon Sawka, said today (Tues) the fire burned approximately 4-thousand acres.
Over the long weekend, people at Sandy Beach and Burgis Beach had to evacuate but not long after were given the O-K by the Canora Fire Department to return.
It took a truly collaborative effort by many to bring the fire down to a manageable level, including cabin owners, farmers and Fire Departments from Yorkton, Canora, Rhien, Sturgis and Ebenezer, RCMP and Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency.
“That’s a community coming together for a common goal and it seems to have worked.” said Trevor Morrissey, Fire Chief of Yorkton Fire Protective Services.
One of the challenges, Morrissey said, while dealing with the blaze was getting access to a water supply.
“It was kind of a fast moving pace, but a slow moving pace at the same time – a lot of coordination, a lot of moving water.
Getting water to the scene, that’s always a challenge, doesn’t sound like it would be at a lake, but even at a lake you can’t get too close because the integrity of the shorelines.
Trying to pull large water from shorelines that are sand you can’t get close enough so we had to haul water in from a few miles away.” Morrissey explained.
Nobody was injured, but there were close calls as the inferno threatened to reach some cabins.
“There was a few cabins that just about were damaged and there was some large yards, some outbuildings that were damaged,” Morrissey noted.
An investigation into the cause is ongoing. Canora Mounties believe the blaze started in an abandoned farm yard.