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One year after his Ft. McMurray burned, Damian Asher, a local firefighter, recalls the moment when, for him, the epic battle against the blaze begins. Excerpted from Inside the Inferno, A Firefighter’s Story of the Brotherhood that Saved Ft. McMurray, which goes on sale on May 2.

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There’s one road in and one road out of Fort McMurray, and that one road was gridlocked. The whole southern lane crowded with cars too slow to outpace clouds of smoke chasing them from the north. The sky, hardly visible through the smoke, was a sea of flames three hundred feet tall in the boreal forest surrounding my city. My city that had turned black and orange in an instant. My city on fire.

Ten minutes ago, I’d arrived at Fire Hall 5 on my afternoon off. When I was called in, the town was hazy but visible and the highway lightly trafficked. By the time I’d buttoned my shirt, laced my duty boots and packed my bunker gear as a precaution, the winds had quickened to sixty kilometres per hour and shifted northeast towards us. I was racing out in a fire engine before the bay door touched the rafters, driving alone into the inferno.

Turning onto the highway with sirens blaring, I dodged cars trying to evacuate from the city. They were climbing from the ditches, barrelling across parking lots and jumping curbs as flakes of burning ember rained on them. The way out of town was bumper-to-bumper and side-door-to-side-door, five lanes of vehicles on a three-lane road, and the northbound route was filling with southbound traffic too. I crushed the air-horn button and swerved into the centre lane, sharing a millisecond of eye contact with the drivers I passed, enough for me to see the fear in their eyes. And now I’d find out for myself what it was they had seen.