BOWDEN - Two local residents — in conjunction with a Calgary artist — have completed a memorial to those affected by the Fort McMurray wildfire.
The wildfire tore through Fort McMurray on May 1, 2016 and wasn't fully extinguished until Aug. 2 that year.
It forced about 88,000 people from their homes, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, and covered about 590,000 hectares (1,500,000 acres).
The fire caused an estimated $9.9 billion in damage. According to Wikipedia, it was the costliest wildfire in Canadian history.
The memorial features 10 brownish-orange steel pillars standing 26 feet high on a 30-foot circular concrete base.
At the top, the pillars are sculpted with ragged edges and holes in them so they look kind of like trees.
They're made of weathered steel — the kind that shipping containers are made of. Inside the pillars are sheets of steel so they catch the light — especially at night when coloured lights synched to music play on them.
Morgan McKee, who lives in Bowden, and his brother Grant McKee, who lives in Olds, created the memorial with Calgary artist Jeff de Boer who was commissioned to create the piece by Syncrude.
Grant had met de Boer via other projects they had worked on.
It took about a year to complete the memorial. It was officially unveiled late last year in Fort McMurray.
"I'm a builder type, but I'm not an artist type, so I figure out how to build stuff and how to make things," said McKee.
"Essentially, we had to invent how to do it. There's no tooling, so we had to create our own tooling, create our own jigs," he said, adding, "we had to use special rods and special wires, special heat processes. So it was quite involved.
"My brother is an electronics genius. He did a lot of the other work as well, but his big contribution was he completely designed a custom circuit for the entire project.
"It senses light, so it knows when it's dark and it runs through programs that we actually made up ourselves.
"He had to make a custom controller board for it because there was nothing that was rated for outdoor use in that kind of harsh environment."
The brothers have created a video of the memorial with the light show they programmed for it. Here is a link to that video: https://youtu.be/uSoYEm1pJ14
Grant shot the video and edited it. Morgan created all the sound for it.
The McKees are already working on several new projects.
For example, they're helping de Boer and another artist create a monument to Calgary firefighters which Morgan said is slated to go in the firefighter museum there.
Locally, they're making a version of the Fort Mac memorial on a different scale so people can place them in their front yards with their house numbers on them. They too would be lit from within.
"They're a little easier to read than those ones that people stick on their garages," McKee said.
Also, "because of all the high rate of theft, we've actually branched into creating custom security bars for windows," McKee said. "We've been doing a lot of that for Red Deer companies right now."
He said it's unfortunate that people need those bars to deter thefts. He described it as "a nice little side business, though."
