I have been quite busy lately, thus the 2-week period since my last post. I also went to Quebec City and Toronto during my reading week…

Last Thursday, I drove to Hagersville and Townsend, Ontario, with my girlfriend’s dad for an article I had to write about the Hagersville tire fire. I summited this piece for my reporting methods class.

Margaret Vander Mees still remembers in great detail that night 20 years ago when she woke  up fearing the worst.

‘‘The fire broke out in the middle of the night and we woke up from the orange. We thought our house was on fire.’’

Vander Mees’ house was not on fire. However, the blaze which woke her family up was in the neighbouring tire dump.

On Feb. 12, 1990, a fire broke out at Tyre King in the small town of Townsend, Ontario. Due to its geographical location, the fire was quickly labelled by authorities and media alike as the ‘‘Hagersville tire fire.’’

For 17 days, dozens of firefighters battled the flames with the help of water-bombing planes. About 13 million used tires burned and released their toxic fumes.

The chaos was such that over 1,700 hundred inhabitants were temporarily evacuated. But, for a few like Vander Mees, the relocation was permanent.

Due to the intense smoke, her house had to be torn down.

The young family was sheltered by relatives for the first three weeks. Soon after, they moved into a trailer for three months before being able to borrow a house. Vander Mees and her husband finally bought their current property in December 1990.

‘‘It was quite the Christmas I will tell you,’’ recalled the mother of four girls ages 3-9 and pregnant with a fifth child at the time. ‘‘We didn’t have a tree, somebody gave us a tree. Somebody else gave us furniture because we had no furniture.’’

In the months following the fire, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment ran a decontamination program to clean the underground water sources contaminated during the firefighting efforts. Fortunately, tests by the Ministry of Agriculture and Food found no trace of contamination in local farm products such as eggs, meat and milk.

However, in April and May 1990, two more fires broke out in tire dumps in the Quebec towns of Ste-Anne-des-Plaines and St-Amable.

Those events prompted provincial and federal authorities to set new guidelines for the storage of used tires. In a report on the Hagersville event, Environment Canada concluded that the extent of the fire was due to poor storage practices allowed by a ‘‘loophole’’ in the law.

Canada’s national fire code was also modified in the late 1990s to prevent future incidents in tire dumps. Today, exhaustive tire recycling programs are in place across Canada, something rare two decades ago.

Unfortunately, incidents still occur despite those efforts. In October 2005, the Ste-Anne-des-Plaines tire dump was once again engulfed in flames.

Grass now covers the ground were millions of used tires were once pilled up in Townsend.

But, while the environmental consequences of the fire are long gone, the event has left a permanent impression on those who lived through it.

A photograph of the local firefighters battling the blaze hangs on the wall of Hagersville’s Princess Submarines sandwich shop. At Parkview Meadows Retirement Village, Townsend’s nursing home, many recall the blaze.

But while the dump fire has become one more piece of folklore in the town’s 160 years of history, the event have left an emotional footprint on some of those who were affected.

One night, Vander Mees’ second youngest daughter had a nightmare after reading an article published on the fifth anniversary of the fire.

‘‘She woke up just screaming in the middle of the night, just absolutely screaming horrifically, terrified,’’ said Vander Mees. ‘‘She had this nightmare that there was a tire burning in the middle of her bedroom, she couldn’t get out.’’

Despite those permanent scares, Vander Mees and her family have moved on since that night on Feb. 12, 1990, when their life took a new turn.

‘‘I’m still afraid of fires,’’ said Vander Mees. ‘‘(But) it’s not life shattering, nobody died or anything like that.’’