Dave Longacre used to fight fires. Now, he tries to prevent them.

This week, the president of Kelowna-based Central Okanagan Fire Retardant Services is launching chemical fire-prevention systems to help deter disasters such as last summer’s blaze on Okanagan Mountain. After burnishing his brand in Kelowna and the rest of B.C., Longacre hopes to sell his product in Alberta and then the rest of Canada.

Longacre, 49, was a member of the Errington, B.C., volunteer fire department in his former home town on Vancouver Island when he rushed to Kelowna to help battle the blaze. He sweated through almost two straight days of flames as fire consumed homes along a swath of land north of Lake Okanagan.

And then he changed his life.

Monte Stewart photo, Business Edge
Dave Longacre displays a sheet of treated cedar-shake shingle that resisted a blowtorch’s flame.

“I was sittin’ on top of the truck and I was watching hundreds of houses burn down all around me,” recalls Longacre. “I just thought, man, I’ve got to do something to help these people protect their properties. I took that leaf of thought back to the Island – and it wouldn’t leave me alone.”

A week later, he moved to Kelowna and launched his new firm. The timing was good because, shortly before the Okanagan Mountain fire, Longacre had returned from a year of travelling to Mexico, the Maritimes and other points.

After becoming tired of spending 20 cold winters as a tugboat operator, towing barges up and down the West Coast between the Queen Charlottes and Vancouver Island, he started doing fire-hazard assessments in the Okanagan.

Longacre originally planned to show residents how to reduce risk by cutting hedges between houses, trimming trees and cleaning up debris from their property – all of which a report revealed as the primary cause of the spread of the fire. But, he discovered, several other agencies were already providing the same service.

So Longacre examined the second-leading cause of the problem – untreated cedar-shake shingles on roofs. He contacted Universal Fire Shield Retardants of Denver, which produces chemicals that protect wood and other surfaces from flames, about acquiring a B.C. distributorship.

But he wound up becoming the exclusive distributor for all of Canada.

“It just seemed to me what I was supposed to be doing – so that’s what I’m doing,” says Longacre, sitting in his second-floor office in a warehouse near Harvey Avenue, Kelowna’s main drag.

“I was in the middle of my mid-life crisis, I guess, and this just seemed like a worthwhile thing to get into.”

After investing $80,000 in his firm, he and his cousin Faye Longacre – now the company’s office manager – hope to show homeowners and business operators the benefits of using Universal’s products. Using nitrogen and other chemicals, the mixture essentially forces the fire to put itself out because it cannot get hot enough to spread.

Standing in his shop, Longacre holds a blowtorch to a cedar shake treated with fire retardant. The torch’s flame is blue, indicating extreme heat.

But, as the chemical bubbles, it produced only two orange balls and then two black circles.

Continuing the demonstration, Longacre goes outside his shop and places several white wooden stakes, formed into the shape of trees, on a plank. The tops of several of the mini-trees have been treated, but not the lower portions. The untreated part of the mini-trees burns, but the treated wood remains virtually unscathed.

The liquid retardant is applied through a low-pressure hose, which sits on a roll in the back of Longacre’s company van.

“There’s absolutely nothing that’s environmentally harmful,” said Longacre, who recently completed Universal’s licence-training program. “It’s good for a year and it’s actually a fertilizer. If there is a fire, it will help the regeneration process . . . It doesn’t kill the flowers around the house. It doesn’t kill the bees and the bugs, or the pets and the kids, or anything.”

In addition to the Okanagan, said Longacre, the company’s products and services will benefit such fire-prone regions of B.C. as Kamloops and Barriere, and Alberta’s Pincher Creek – areas from which hundreds of residents were evacuated last summer.

The B.C. government is already bracing for another bad year of forest fires after 2,605 acres were burned, more than 300 homes in the Interior were destroyed and 50,000 people fled flames last summer.

Solicitor General Rich Coleman, who is responsible for emergency crews, has said that the 2004 fire season could equal last year’s.

As a result, several other companies are trying to help prevent more disasters. No Burn Canada of Edmonton, which also markets fire retardants, said it has successfully negotiated a reduction in commercial insurance rates.