The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation quotes the chair of the fire equipment working group for the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre as saying fire shelters have not been used by wildland firefighters in Canada since 2005.
Below is an excerpt from a CBC article:
In Canada, fire shelters are no longer used at all. Marc Mousseau, chair of the fire equipment working group for the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, said they were never widely deployed, and B.C. became the last province to stop deploying them in 2005.
Lucy Tower, manager of B.C.’s fire equipment depot, told CBCNews.ca Tuesday that the decision was made because the province’s firefighters are never put in a situation where they would need to deploy a fire shelter. Much of the terrain where wildfires occur in Canada is also densely forested.
That type of terrain is unsuitable for using the shelters, said John Flinn, equipment coordinator for the New Brunswick provincial fire warehouse.
“You have to have some place open … where you can get away from adjacent fuels,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. “There’s no place in the Maritimes you can do that, really.”
In general, Canadian wildfire fighters are equipped with the view that firefighters should avoid putting themselves in harm’s way to begin with.
When I worked in Alaska during the 80s and early 90s no one carried them there – in my opinion they’re pretty useless in the fuel types there. Maybe that’s changed since then.
A lot of non-fire people I’ve talked to since the Yarnell tragedy are really surprised at how, let’s say, limited the effectiveness of fire shelters are when I explain the construction and limitations.
There was a huge amount of discussions and reasons why we decided to no longer pack shelters. It was not as quick and easy of a decision, that the article alludes to.
Fire shelter performance was tested during the International Crown Modeling Experiment. A report of the findings can be found here…
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x04-091