Fighting fire with dry ice and paper bags full of water: Remembering Ontario's largest wildfire, in 1948

Scorching a record 200,000 hectares of northern Ontario wilderness, the 1948 Mississagi fire is remembered as the largest wildfire in the province's history.

But the men who tried to keep the flames at bay mostly remembered the terrifying working conditions. 

"The crown fires, they just whizzed over our head. Just unbelievable. You wouldn't believe the explosions. And you just look up and see balls of fire going across over your head and hope nothing happened to you," former firefighter Lou Romhanyi recalled in a 2006 interview.

"We had to duck into some lakes. It was amazing to see a rabbit and a wolf running together. They were just wanting to get out of that area."

It's believed the fire have started north of Blind River on May 25, 1948, by a campfire lit by an "illegal trapper," and soon after merged with another wildfire south of Chapleau.

"The smoke from the fire was so intense that even in Texas they were having to put on streetlights at 3 p.m.," said Tegan Campbell from the Timber Village Museum in Blind River, which has an exhibit this summer marking the fire's 75th anniversary.

"In Blind River, the visibility was about three feet."

Campbell said the Mississagi fire saw some of the first experiments in aerial firefighting, including the use of "primitive scoops" on airplanes and even pilots dropping paper bags full of water on the flames. 

There was also a well-publicized experiment in cloud seeding, with dry ice shipped up from southern Ontario to try to encourage rain to fall on the massive fire.

"Some of the pilots having to set it to coast and then get a wood ladle and spoon these dry ice pellets out through chutes," Campbell said. 

"It wasn't very effective. The best they got was sort of a light shower."

The fire burned for several months, but unlike other notorious wildfires from northern Ontario's past, there were few deaths.

Afterwards, the Ontario government launched a huge effort to salvage as many trees as they could from the charred forest. What was known as Operation Scorch employed 2,000 loggers and saved some 300 million board feet of lumber. 

Campbell said the roads built into the wilderness to fight the fire and then harvest logs led to greater development of the northern woods, including Mississagi Provincial Park.