Article content continued

Located at the Fort Mac airport, the warehouse is a logistical depot for firefighters, providing aviation fuel, rope, protective equipment, fire retardant and the like.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or

First, Linley’s bunkhouse burned. So he moved in with a friend. Then that house burned to the ground, so he moved out to be at the warehouse. Then, when the airport was threatened, he had to move north. But firefighters saved the airport, and now he’s back there.

Linley lost everything but the clothes on his back, and mid-week, Conrad arranged to get some things to him.

“It was like trying to send something to Shah Wali Kot (an area in the Canadian area of operation in Kandahar province),” he said Friday in a phone interview. “I never really appreciated how sparsely populated this province is.

“Zak is hanging in, doing his job. His mom and dad are worried I know, but he has to do his job; the game is in his hands. They need him.”

Then there’s Conrad’s youngest son, Morgan, who has really taken to the outdoors — he even has his own trap line and is a licensed trapper — since the family moved to Alberta.

He’s a helitack firefighter, one of the crews who are deployed by chopper into the burning forests to battle the blazes.

He leaves Sunday for the fire moving in from British Columbia to Alberta’s Peace River area in the northwest of the province and which was Friday just miles from the border. B.C. crews will continue to fight it, but so will some from Alberta, Morgan’s crew included.