Canada firefighters battled blaze as own homes burned down

By Rod Nickel
GREGOIRE LAKE, Alberta, May 8 (Reuters) - Fort McMurray's
160 firefighters worked almost non-stop in the first days of a
massive Canadian wildfire that sent nearly 90,000 fleeing for
safety, even as some of them lost their own homes, fire
officials said on Sunday.
The wildfire scorching through Canada's oil sands region in
northeast Alberta has razed entire neighborhoods in the city.
The blaze, in its seventh day and now the size of Mexico City,
is moving away from the city and oil sands facilities.

"One of our members stood at the end of his driveway,
watched his house burn to the ground, and then put in an 18-hour
shift for the rest of the city," captain Nick Waddington, 37,
said by phone from Fort McMurray, which is still off-limits to
the public and guarded by police.
"We were going to work to the end to save our city," he
said. "This is our home."
For each of the first two days, firefighters worked as many
as 24 hours straight, inhaled smoke and coped with cuts, bruises
and sore feet. None has been seriously hurt.
An especially hard decision was to sacrifice parts of some
neighbourhoods in those early days, before firefighters and
equipment arrived from elsewhere, to spare others.
The neighborhoods of Waterways, where Waddington used to
live, Beacon Hill and Abasand were engulfed in "major, major
fires" that left Fort McMurray's fire crews outmatched. So they
abandoned Waterways to save as much as possible of the other
two.
"We had to make tough decisions - to leave an entire section
of the city to go and save another section," said Waddington,
who is also president of the Fort McMurray Firefighters
Association.
There were also clear victories. Damage was limited in other
big neighborhoods such as Timberlea and Thickwood.
More than 500 firefighters were in and around Fort McMurray,
along with 15 helicopters, 14 air tankers and 88 other pieces of
equipment, officials said.
Waddington credited firefighters from other communities,
along with eight probational recruits, who had one month of
experience before being pressed into action.
Shift schedules are now returning to normal, and on
Saturday, exhausted firefighters got to sleep in a hotel, taking
their first showers in almost a week.
On Sunday, Mother's Day, the Fort McMurray firefighters
gathered for a group photo to send to their mothers and wives to
show they were "safe and strong," Waddington said.
Nearly all of Fort McMurray's 88,000 residents escaped the
fire safely. Two people were killed in a car crash during the
evacuation, including the 16-year-old daughter of a deputy fire
chief from a nearby hamlet who had been fighting the fire.
"Everything in this city is a particular accomplishment,"
Waddington said. "Every building. Every person that's down south
right now, that's alive, is a particular accomplishment."