When it was all said and done, a 2021 wildfire near the community of Tomahawk, Alta., raged for two months, charred an area of forest equivalent to 5,500 football fields and razed a dozen structures.
It was also the largest wildfire that University of Alberta engineering professor Jeff Boisvert had faced in the two years since he'd begun moonlighting as a paid-on-call firefighter in Parkland County.
"It was a different beast," he says. "We really couldn't put enough water on it to put it out crown fires burn that hot.
"You don't really know where exactly the fire is a lot of the time, and not knowing also dictates how we respond to it."
