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Ember Fire Academy celebrates its 11th year; hopes to move to rural communities

Wednesday, 13 August 2025 07:31

By Stuart Bonell X @BonellStuart

Four Ember recruits train with fire extinguishers against a propane fire at Ibex Valley Fire Rescue (Photo: S. Bonell)

12 women, girls, and people of historically underrepresented genders in the fire service are participating in the weeklong firefighting training and leadership academy at both Ibex Valley Fire Rescue and Hootalinqua Fire Department this week.

Ember Fire Academy is celebrating its 11th annual firefighting training course this week.

12 women, girls, and people of historically underrepresented genders in the fire service are participating in the weeklong firefighting training and leadership academy at both Ibex Valley Fire Rescue and Hootalinqua Fire Department this week.

Teslin resident Veronica Huggard is attending Ember 2025 as a recruit. She says that she looks forward to giving back to her community.

“I’m, like, 99 per cent sure after this I’d like to join the Teslin Fire Department,” said Huggard.

“This is incredible! It’s really great learning and being a learner, and seeing all these inspirational people – especially women. I’m definitely keen to get back to Teslin and hopefully put my name in the hat and see what I can do to help out with our local fire department.”

The first nine years of Ember Fire Academy were hosted at Golden Horn Volunteer Fire Department, before being moved to Hootalinqua and Ibex Valley for the last two years. Yukon Fire Marshal and former Ember Chief Kiara Adams says that the long-term vision for the program is to move around to communities further away from Whitehorse.

“Depending on the community, the program is very high-paced and dialed in. It’s a very full program,” said Adams. “There’s a lot of site-specific things that we do […] so we would tweak the program to fit the various locations, but it will maintain it’s original structure as much as possible.”

Adams also noted that the majority of the instructors at Ember Fire Academy took part in the course themselves in previous years. 

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