Group Supervisor

When I was seven our family moved from Calgary to Southern California. A close family friend had worked as a fire fighter in and around the San Bernardino area when he was young. This is an area that can have big fires in the fall, fanned by the Santa Ana winds they can put on a spectacular show. We were poor and this is what we did for excitement and entertainment when I was a kid. We would drive out at night about 20 miles from the fires and watch the incredible glow as the fires raced up the mountains. My earliest impression was that fire fighters are a noble bunch and that this would be a worthy career.

As fate would have it after high school I went to work with the BC Forest Service in the summer and in 1978 started on the Salmon Arm District Fire Suppression Crew. 79 was a terrible fire year in the Kamloops region and a 9 person crew from Lower Post along the BC Yukon boarder came south from the rain to help with the inaccessible fires. The crew called themselves the Spider Crew or Rapattack. In 1980 the Rapattack crew moved to Salmon Arm and became a provincial resource and I was one of the locals hired. I stayed with Rapattack for three seasons until the opportunity to join Alberta’s newly formed Provincial Helitack Program. My job as a co-ordinator was to develop the operations manual, train the rappellers and share in supervising the conventional and rappel crews. It was an exciting time I’ll never forget.

Two buddies and I started Wilderness Fire Management Inc., a contract initial attack and prescribed burning company in 1985. I left Alberta in 1986 to manage the company. At the peak of operations Wilderness Fire employed 130 seasonal fire fighters from nine bases and actioned up to 350 fires in a season. It was a terrific experience. Changes in B.C. provincial politics ended the privatisation initiatives within government and the opportunity for contracting. I closed down the fire operations after the 1992-fire season and enrolled at Asia Pacific Institute to earn an MBA in International Business.

I returned to the fire community as the Superintendent of Fire Equipment with the B.C. Ministry of Forests in Victoria in 1994. This was the period of reengineering with in the Protection Branch and during the two fire seasons I managed the fire equipment function significant changes occurred including the consolidation of 46 warehouses into 3 central locations.

My partner and I moved to Jasper in 1996 where I worked seasonally with the BC Ministry of Forests as a Protection Assistant for four summers until joining FERIC. During the winter months I consulted and for the past couple of winters taught business at Lethbridge Community College.

Email: Ray Ault

Phone: (780) 865-6977