A vehicle fire on the Klondike Highway stopped traffic in both directions. Canadian firefighters crossed the border to assist. 

 

A May 24 vehicle fire at Mile 14 on the Klondike Highway shut down the two-lane road and triggered an international response. When Skagway Fire Chief Emily Rauscher received notification of a truck, towing an RV, engulfed in flames, she quickly called to Canada for backup.

“So it’s complicated up there because of radio communications,” Rauscher says. “It’s complicated up there because there’s no water source. It’s complicated because it’s out of town.”

The area where the fire occurred, called The Summit, has no cell phone service. It’s 2,000 feet above sea level, and a long and slow drive for tenders carrying water.

The Skagway Fire Department has one certified tender that can haul 3,000 gallons. Its fire truck can carry 1,000 gallons. When the fire department arrived at the scene, the engineer dammed up a small pool of water with a tarp and directed it to the fire engine as a precaution against running out of water.

Three rigs responded from Canada, one tender from Carcross and two tenders from Mount Lorne. The fire was under control within an hour and traffic was allowed to pass through, ensuring tourists made it on time for the state ferry and cruise ship departures.

No one was injured and Rauscher says there was plenty of water.

After the fire was contained, a medical call from Skagway proper necessitated sending two paramedics back to town. When the fire department returned to Skagway and began cleaning their equipment, two more medical requests came in, along with another fire call. Rauscher says the trend of overlapping calls is becoming more common and concerning.

“This is something we’ve, we’ve never really seen before,” she says. “Two people on a shift is not enough to handle these overlapping calls. So we need to get ahead of it.”

Rauscher says solutions need to be found for the increasing demand.

“Our resources are definitely being stretched super thin,” she says. “And I do think, and I’m like preparing myself, that this summer might be the summer where we just don’t have the infrastructure at the fire department to handle all of the requests. And it’s not a what if this is going to happen. It’s, this is happening, and this is the objective data that shows that there is this demand.”

A contracted critical care paramedic will soon be joining the fire department. The position is within the department’s current budget.