17 Oct 2026: Major fire at CFB Wainwright

[Cloud Cover]

The NoK notification system isn't set up for this sort of situation. Not enough people. It was set up for Afghanistan. And this has already surpassed Afghanistan single incident numbers.

We exercised a ship being hit once at the Ottawa PA and notification coordination level. The processes were immediately out of their depth. It's complicated, fluid with scanty information. And you sure as hell don't want to notify the wrong family.

This is the type of thing they should work on to improve, what with all the war and invasion talk of late.
Losing a ship, yikes.

 

[foresterab]

I just saw a video on Facebook showing the winds just south of the base which a farmer took just before evacuating. I'm not sure I've ever seen winds this severe. No wonder the fire spread quickly. Poor souls. I will be praying hard tonight.

The wind event yesterday was rare...but not unheard of.

That being said high winds and cured grass...that's the sort of situations that scare me as a trained professional wildland guy.

Been to Wainwright several times visiting CAF members. It's a very unreal, and dynamic aspect going on.

My condolences to the families affected and the CAF as a whole.

 

[MilEME09]

Next breifing at 3pm mountain time by the defense minister and others from Wainwright.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Next breifing at 3pm mountain time by the defense minister and others from Wainwright.

That's 1700 Eastern, if I remember both ends' daylight savings time rules, right?

 

[medicineman]

Edmonton and Calgary each have eight bed burn units. I would assume they can probably surge to a few more beds in an emergency, but I would also assume neither was vacant. I expect that ICU likely took some.

I saw a post on Twitter this morning where a mother identified her son at 1 Fd Amb as being one of the seriously injured.

Carney to speak any minute now.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/livestory/cfb-wainwright-fire-live-updates-9.7385537

Worst come to worst, trauma surgery and surgical ICU beds would be used - burns is trauma and trauma is a surgical isssue.

You can’t plan for everything no matter how hard you try.
Mr. Murphy will find a way around it.

I can say from experience that I don't think we've ever exercised a large scale casualty event in many years as far as tracking goes. Myself and a few other colleagues were supposed to be involved in a large scale NATO ex in the late 90's that was simply tracking casualty movement from role 1/2 rearwards - unfortunately we never got to go for whatever reason. From what I heard on a debrief of this, our European allies were decades ahead of us in tracking - barcoding patients to track in real time on computer tracking, etc. I was involved with a casualty evacuation exercise with both the RAF Auxiliary and a couple Air Guard Squadrons from the USAF, and those movements were confusing at best, especially if message traffic over secure radio means was disrupted - had to be by radio, they wouldn't use dispatch riders or other means of message traffic, which caused a lot of issues with bottlenecking of people in forward Combat Support Hospitals.

I'd hate to be patient tracking team responsible for something of the scale this seems to be...

 

[HavokFour]

RIP

Saskatchewan mother identifies son as one of four soldiers confirmed dead at CFB Wainwright

One of the four Canadian soldiers killed in an incident at CFB Wainwright has been identified by his mother.

edmontonjournal.com

Archive

Saskatchewan family grieving as four soldiers confirmed dead in Wainwright tragedy

Prime Minister Mark Carney has confirmed four Canadian Armed Forces members were killed and dozens more seriously injured in Saturday's devastating incident at CFB Wainwright, as a Prince Albert mother publicly mourns the loss of her son. Speaking Sunday, Oct. 18, Carney described the tragedy as...

discovermoosejaw.com

Sask. family grieving as four killed at Wainwright military base

Shaun Farrell of Prince Albert was among the Armed Forces personnel who died, and PM Mark Carney said those involved included reservists and members of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry.

www.ckom.com