On Wednesday, May 10, fire crews in the RM of Hanover were called to two separate bridge fires on the same night, each just miles from New Bothwell. Both bridges were completely destroyed in the process.
Since then, the Office of the Fire Commissioner has concluded its investigation, determining that the fires are deemed to have been “accidental in nature.”
While Hanover fire chief Paul Wiebe was not in a position to comment on the cause, he says there were stubble fires burning in the area of these bridges on Wednesday night when his crews attended to the fires.
Earlier that evening, these field fires were responsible for a hydro pole and shed that caught fire near New Bothwell.
One of the bridges is located on Highway 311, about two miles east of the New Bothwell turnoff. Three miles of highway have now been cordoned off and a detour created that takes drivers into New Bothwell and along Crown Valley Road to Highway 206.
This blocked-off busy stretch of highway will be an inconvenience to commuters and emergency vehicles for some time to come.
Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure (MTI) staff were at both burn sites on May 11 in order to assess the damage and create a plan for replacement.
“The costs of damages will be determined after the assessments are completed,” an MTI spokesperson told The Citizen. “MTI anticipates that assessments will be completed in summer 2023.”
The spokesperson was unwilling to comment on how long it may take the province to replace the bridges or whether alternate materials will be used to construct them. As well, no indications were made as to whether the person responsible for the stubble fire will be held liable in any way.
Wiebe says that it took all three of Hanover’s fire crews to attend to the bridge fires. As well, they called in water tankers from Tache and Steinbach to assist Hanover’s four tankers already on site.
The thick black smoke that erupted from the bridges as they burned, he says, was caused by off-gassing from the substances the timbers are coated with.
“These are wooden bridges that are made of treated timbers,” Wiebe says. “That treated material and creosote that’s on there, it’ll just burn up all that stuff on the outside quickly. It doesn’t mean that it’s immediately not structurally sound. It takes a long time to burn.”
Twenty-four hours after the fire crews were called in, the bridges continued to burn, partly as a result of the many structural joints where embers can smolder and not be doused. As well, Wiebe says, water in the canal made some areas of the bridges’ underbelly difficult for them to reach.
“We could cool it down, but we couldn’t completely extinguish it,” Wiebe says. “We had crews there from Wednesday night when the fires started all the way through to Thursday evening just to keep putting out hotspots. We can’t do that indefinitely.”
When MTI staff arrived on Thursday, the decision was made to dismantle the bridge structures completely to allow oxygen to reach every cranny and rapidly complete the inevitable burn process.
One incident in particular caught the attention of the media and many social media sites the next day. On Wednesday, while the fires raged, a nearby onlooker captured an unusual sight on video: a dark-coloured vehicle entered the burning bridge, disappeared behind a black curtain of smoke, and re-emerged on the other side.
Wiebe says he can’t speak with certainty regarding the identity of the driver of that vehicle, but it would be safe to assume that it was, in fact, one of his fire crew members.
“We drive through a lot of smoke sometimes to get to a fire. So if it was one of our guys, it was within the duty of his job,” Wiebe says. “Any time we have grass fires, we have to drive through smoke. And sometimes we can’t see at all.”
The Office of the Fire Commissioner would like to issue a reminder to Manitobans not to leave fires burning unattended.
“Check with municipalities if burning restrictions are in place,” they say. “The province will not issue burning permits within areas bordering any municipality where municipal burning restrictions are already in place.”
