Crews putting out hot spots in Hemlock Ravine brush fire
Posted Jul 12, 2018 05:25:00 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A brush fire in Hemlock Ravine has no more active burning and crews are spending late Thursday afternoon focusing on hot spots.
Halifax Regional Fire and Emergency division chief Dave Meldrum said calls started coming in for the ravine fire just before lunch.
“There was a pretty good production of smoke in the early stages of this fire,” he told NEWS 95.7's The Sheldon MacLeod Show. “The firefighters themselves on arrive had to do quite a bit of detective work to determine the precise location.”
That included taking to the top of an apartment building on Masthead Court to get an aerial view. They found the blaze around 600 feet into the woods.
“The terrain the woods here is very thick and very uneven, so there's a significant risk to our firefighters of slips, trips and falls,” said Meldrum.
One firefighter suffered heat exhaustion, but Meldrum said his prognosis is good, however he has been taken to hospital as a precaution.
Fire crews were also on the scene of a second brush fire on an island in Rocky Lake.
“It's not as big as it looked from the mainland,” Halifax Fire said in a Tweet.
On Thursday an open-air burning ban was declared for all of Halifax Regional Municipality until further notice.
Halifax Fire is asking residents to call 911 if they see an open fire while the ban is in place.
The municipal ban takes priority over restrictions imposed by the province.
