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Jordan Heath Rawlings
It’s been more than two weeks since an unprecedented start to wildfire season out west forced thousands to flee their homes.
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More than 24,000 people have now been forced to evacuate their homes in Alberta where unseasonably warm weather mixing with strong winds has been fueling wildfires.
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The raging wildfires in Western Canada have wiped out more than 2 million acres of land in Alberta.
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Australian firefighters have arrived in the country to aid more than 2,800 crews battling multiple fires.
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There is 71 wildfires in the forest protection area of Alberta. Twenty of those are out of control.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
But here’s a question. How long do we get to use the term unprecedented, when huge out of control fires begin to happen every few years and then every year? Right now, sure, what we are seeing has almost never happened before, but that won’t be the case next year or the year after. We know it’s coming. This is the world that we live in now, but we are not helpless against it. The climate is changing, so the fires are changing, and so we have to change too. For decades, we’ve had a playbook for preparing for fighting, controlling, and extinguishing wildfires, but those were the old fires, the precedent fires. We need a new playbook to fight the fires of the future, and it’s being written in real time right now.
I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Dr. Mike Flanagan is a professor at Thompson Rivers University. He is a BC research chair in predictive services, emergency management, and fire science, all things that must come in handy right now. Mike?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
Yes, Jordan. For sure.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
Well, listen, it’s been more than two weeks since these fires in Alberta and, and other parts of the west really started getting out of control. I understand there’s been some recent rain. I just wanna ask you, as we begin, a lot of the clips we’ve seen in headlines we’ve seen about this have said, you know, this is an unprecedented start to fire season. These are unprecedented fires. How accurate is that from your point of view?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
For May and for Alberta, it is record-breaking. It’s over a million hectors, which is put into something of context. It’s more than 10 times the size of Calgary or Edmonton. So huge chunk of real estate. And for this time of year, we’ve never seen this much area burned, at least in our modern records.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
Can you tell us maybe in general, because I understand this is changing, how we would traditionally fight fires regardless of the time of year. Do we have a playbook for this and what’s it say?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
So the playbook changes from location to location. In Canada, the landowner is responsible for fire management. So that means 10 provinces, two territories. Yes. I know there are three territories, but only two do fire management, Yukon and Northwest Territories. Nunavut does not do fire management. They do have fire, but they just let Mother Nature take its course. Also Parks Canada, as a landowner does fire management and Department of National Defence does a little bit on some of their largest bases as well. And each one does it a little differently, but historically, with the exception, maybe Parks Canada fire was considered bad if you saw a fire you put out and the strategy was. And to this day for unwanted fires, A fire that’s starting two kilometers from Timmons, Ontario, that’s unwanted fire.
You hit hard, you hit fast. If it’s small smaller than a football field or a soccer pitch, it’s easy for a crew to put out. If it gets bigger than that football field and it’s hot, dry, and windy, and the fuels are dry, now you have a real problem. And much of the area burned and impacts we see happens during extreme episodes like we’ve just seen in Alberta, in parts of Saskatchewan, BC, and I would include the Northwest Territories is seeing some real action today, as we’re speaking, it happens on days of hot, dry, windy weather. And these episodes last a few days and then they generally go away. In Canada, 3% of our fires burn, 97% of our area burn.
And much of this happens on what we call these spread days, these hot, dry, windy days. So if we can control those extremes, you know, we can keep a, keep a handle on things. So back to the traditional firefighting, you hit hard, you hit fast, so you want to be detected right away so you can get the crews out there because when things are extreme, and we saw this in Lytton 2021, you know from the time the fires start until the time that the community was on fire can be as little as 15 to 20 minutes. So you have to get reported right away and then action it right away. We hit with crews, and crews are the ones put the fires out. It’s hard work, it’s hot work, it’s smokey work. We also use aerial attack, water, foam, retardant. But if we get these intense fires, and this is when we, we call ’em crown fires, it spreads from the forest floor up to the tops of the trees, the crowns of the trees. And this is for in our country, conifers only. Okay? Our deciduous trees do not crown.
So when you get this crowning, the water, foam, you know, if the fire is bigger than that football field. It’s like spitting on a campfire. You’re, you’re not doing any good. You’re wasting your money. There’s still one tool in their toolbox, and that’s a back burn or a burnout operation. And the principle here is, the fire is spreading with the wind. You get out in front of it, start a new fire, but it’s backing into the wind and you start at a highway or a river, something that you have a, you know, a fire guard. And backing is lower intensity, but it’s burning the fuel. The wildfire meets this burnout operation. It’s got no fuel. Bang, away we go, we got it. The problem is, you can’t do it if the winds are shifting because then that backfire become a head fire and now you’ve got two fires going and, but in terms of if the winds are stable, not changing direction, it’s a very effective tool and it’s used all the time, more and more these days.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
How well do all those things work against some of the fires we’ve seen recently? I know by numbers they’re not technically unprecedented. But you mentioned Lytton, there have been a number of really fast, really hot fires in recent years right. And are the fires themselves changing a bit?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
So the first part of the question was, are these effective. On an average summer day they’re very effective. It’s on those extreme days. They can be effective if you get to the fire when it’s small. So initial attack, we call it initial attack. Initial attack, they can be very effective. But if it, if you don’t succeed, an initial attack in putting it out. Then there can be a real problem and has been, and you know, I’ll back up here. The Boreal forest survives thrives in a regime of semi-regular stand renewing, stand replacing fires. Okay. There’s always been big I intense fires. Are we seeing more intensity in the fires? I would argue yes, we are. Okay. Whether we can demonstrate it yet or not. That’s a different question, but we are seeing more extreme fire weather, which we can demonstrate and have published.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
So it’s not necessarily the fires themselves that are changing so much as it is the conditions that can allow them to spread so rapidly and there are more of those crazy burn days. Is that right?
Yep. There’s more of these crazy burn days and another facet of fire that’s critical is fuel moisture. So how dry the fuels are. If you walk through the forest floor and you hear that crunch, crunch, crunch, that means it’s bone dry. It’s easy for a fire to start. So drier the fuel, the easier it is for fires to start, spread and means more fuels available to burn. Which leads to those higher intensity fires, which are difficult to impossible to extinguish. Climate change is leading to these more extreme conditions, drier fuels. So there’s a recipe for wildfires. You need three ingredients. The first is vegetation. We call it fuel. The stuff that burns, how much, what type, how dry, all important aspects.
Second, humus and lightning are the common causes of fire. In Canada, it’s about 50/50, though it’s kind of seasonal human cause fires dominate in the spring. Lightning cause dominate in the summer. Lightning caused fires are responsible for 80 to 90% of the area burned, even though they’re only 50% of the fires. And the third ingredient in this recipe, hot, dry, windy weather. You get all three, you have a fire. So the climate’s changing. We are getting warmer. And the warmer the planet gets, the more fire we see and people say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why is temperature so important here and here? I’m not talking about individual fire like Fort McMurray or Lytton, where wind becomes quite a critical issue here I’m talking about fire of a larger area like Ontario or Quebec for a longer period of time, decades so warmer, gets longer than fire seasons, and we’re seeing that already. Albert, for example, officially fire season starts March 1st. It used to be April 1st. Our fire season’s getting longer. Last year we saw fires burning in the territories.
Crown fires burning in the territories in October, burning through the night. And I would, yes, I agree with you, unprecedented is overused, but in that case, I would say, yeah, that’s unprecedented. I had never seen that. I’ve been watching fire since the seventies, and you know, I have data from prior to that. So longer fire seasons second, the warmer it gets, the more lightning we see and the more lightning we see, the more lightning caused fires, which are responsible for most of the area burned. The third reason, probably the most important, but probably the hardest to figure out is, as the atmosphere warms the ability to suck moisture those fuels, that vegetation, increases almost exponentially. So unless we see more precipitation during our fire season to compensate for this drying effect of the warming, we’re going to have drier fuels. Most of the malls of the future climate say warmer and largely drier during the fire season. So we’re kind of snookered in a warmer world because we’re gonna see more fire and we have to learn to live with fire and other cascading effects too.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
So given all that, which is all pretty terrifying, and at this point, you know, some of it is inevitable, how should we change the way we fight or don’t fight fires? And maybe start since this part of your job description, which with how we would prepare for this new kind of season in this new kind of climate.
Dr. Mike Flanagan
And we are changing, you know, fire management personnel are professional, they’re well trained, but we have to adapt to the new situation, the new reality. Some people like to say new normal. I don’t like normal because we’re on a trajectory and it’s a downward spiral. So it’s, it’s a new reality and we are changing. Are we changing fast enough? That’s a fair question. And the, change is not uniform across Canada because as I said, fire management’s the responsibility of the landowner. So you’ve got, what, 13 or 14 different players? I would say Ontario, rarely do I say Ontario’s a, you know, a leading example of this change. Parks Canada’s also played a role for decades, and the, the principle here is, you make a rapid decision about whether that fire is unwanted or wanted. You gotta make a decision within a couple of minutes to say what to do.
And sometimes it’s half a second, that case where it was a few kilometres outside Timmons, Ontario, that’s unwanted fire. Okay? So you, you send resources and put it out, hit hard, hit it fast. Let’s say now the fire is 50 kilometers north of Timmons. What happens is, The fire management agency gets the fire weather forecast for the next 15 days. They run the fire growth model, say, where is that fire going to spread in the next 15 days? Is it threatening communities, railways, infrastructure? And then say, are there benefits to this fire? And you say, what benefits? I think a spruce budworm, you know, fire is a great agent knocking down spruce budworm. So there are times where fire is beneficial. So make a decision and you say, hey I think this fire we should just monitor and manage at this time. So they, they wait another day and they monitor it. Then they get a new fire weather forecast, a new fire growth model, and then update their decisions.
And all the time they’re looking to say, okay, we’ll let the fire spread to this river or this road and we’ll stop it there. Alright. And this gives you time to do those burnout operations and what this does is it creates a mosaic landscape, which is much more natural. It’s working with mother nature, allowing fires on the landscape when and where possible. Now, recently burned areas are unlikely to re burn. For 10 years, 20 years, if it’s a wetland, more like 50 years. And even if we get those extreme fire weather conditions, hot, dry, windy, and it does burn, it’s much lower intensity because there isn’t as much fuel to burn. The problem becomes places like California, I would argue Alberta, is if fire grows to any size, it’s bumping into something that society values. Okay. And that’s, that’s the real problem is in those areas. So what do we do in Albertas and in the Californias? Oh, that, that’s a real challenge, we can do prescribed fire. But to do it, the scale needed, it’s really a challenge. And prescribed burning is not popular. Smoke is not good for human health. The more we find out about smoke, the more we find out is really, really bad. But the scale required to do the burning, to replace natural fire, I don’t think is achievable at this time.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
So what do you do with the fire that is unwanted and you know, as you mentioned, gets so big so fast, that it’s difficult to control. Like do we have any ways to stop that? Are we looking at new technologies? I guess I’m trying to get a sense of, you know, as the climate is changing and it’s changing these fires, how are we changing what we actually do on the ground? Or is that even possible?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
Emergence management has different phases: prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response or recovery. Some people include review in that list as well. And fire management’s great response, pretty good preparedness. There is room for prevention and mitigation. for improvements. Hot, dry, windy weather. Hey, we can’t do much about that, okay? Unless we deal with climate change as a whole, globally, let’s just put it aside and say, Hey, you know, hot, dry, windy weather exists and not much we can do about it. Lightning, same sort of thing. You know, we can’t really change lightning until we deal with climate change. Human caused fires. 50% of the fires are human caused. I would argue all of them are preventable. And you know, and to be fair, in Canada, human caused fires, an area burn from human caused fires has been decreasing. But you know, this situation we’re seeing in Alberta. These are primarily human cause fires that, and in the past May is the busiest month in Alberta because of some of the weather patterns we see. But because there’s so many human cause fires, we see this spring window across Canada. Okay?
After the snow, after the snow goes, it melts eventually. You have this period where you’ve got all this dead organic material from the previous fall and until things green up, it’s easy for a fire to start. So, we can do more about eliminating human cause fires. Fire bands are very effective. But what’s even more effective and more unpopular is forced closures and they, to Alberta’s credit, they did it on the long weekend. They closed some of their parks, so, more money spent on prevention and studies from the states find, for every dollar you spent on prevention, it saves you $4 to $14 down the road. So more prevention. Now, there was another ingredient is vegetation. And you know, our friends to the south, they wanna spend billions of dollars to try and modify the landscape, the entire landscape to be less fire conducive. They’re pissing the running away. Okay. It’s just stupidity on a major level.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
Why?
Dr. Mike Flanagan
Because it, it won’t work. It can’t work, okay. To treat at least 30 to 40% of the landscape. Think of about 30, 40% of the landscape, the cost would be trillions of dollars. And fires, you know, if you treat a landscape by removing fuel, it just moves around it or jumps over it. But what is possible is communities or local areas or possibly even, you know, larger regions like Okanagan for example, where doing enough managing the fuel and it can work except for you’re as strong as your weakest link. And I’ll give you example. So you have a block, okay, 10, let’s just say 10 houses on this block. Nine do everything right in terms of fire smarting, one doesn’t. So this rain of burning embers comes from this hood control, high intensity crown fire. And you’ve, maybe you’ve seen video from Fort McMurray. Yeah. It’s a rain of these embers. Okay.
And so the one house that hasn’t done anything, it hits, you know, some conifer shrubs and burns the house. Now you go, that house catches, the next house on fire is structured. You know, building to building to building. So the whole community’s breached. Because you’re as strong as your weakest link. Now, California is kind of leading the way in a lot of policy changes because in some jurisdictions they’ve mandated you will not have any flammable material within five feet of your house or 1.5 meters for us in Canada. And that’s, and that’s maybe a way we have to go. I mean, in traditional firefighting, some of the things we can do better is right now when things start to blow up in Alberta. They called Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. We call it CIFFC for short and say, Hey, we need help.
Okay, cruise aircraft, et cetera, and Ontario, Quebec, and now we’re getting resources from New Zealand or Mexico or California, like all around the world. They facilitate that and that’s great, but you know, the extreme fire weather we saw a week in advance okay? They should have called earlier to say, Hey, can you send resources now ahead of time so that they’re in place? Because when they place that call, Alberta’s already on fire. It takes three days for that firefighter from Ontario or Quebec to get on the fire line. Three days, and who knows? Sometimes there’s a whole heavy downpour and you’re coming just to mop up because the show’s over kind of thing.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
How do we get better at that? That’s, that was gonna be one of my last questions anyway, which is how do we get better at telling when a fire is going to absolutely explode and we need help as soon as we can get it. We need all hands on deck versus, like you just described, in terms of continuing to watch and monitor and see, and then you jump into action and hope you’re not too late.
Dr. Mike Flanagan
We already have early warning systems, but we need to enhance these and we need to use them appropriately. So extreme fire weather, our weather models are good to about seven days. Okay? But seven days is better than, you know. We need three days advanced warning to move resources, and we are using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and it’s just another tool. It’s not a panacea, but conventional approaches work as well to say, where are we going to see that extreme fire weather? Because extreme fire weather is really what’s driving the show here. The other aspect is fire occurrence and we have models of fire occurrence, prediction of lightning and people quite different processes. So two separate models, use those advance to say, where are we expecting fires? We know where the existing fires are on the landscape.
We get models of where we expect new fires. We know where the extreme fire weather will be. You get those, call those resources and move them to the locations where we expect the extreme fire weather. Where the existing fires already are, or the new fires are expected so that we can better deal with them. Now, even if we do everything perfectly, there are gonna be occasions where we are overwhelmed. 2017, July 7th/8th, British Columbia, over a hundred new lightning fires starts. You don’t have a hundred crews, you don’t have a hundred helicopters. Even if you knew it was coming, you’d still be overwhelmed. And that’s just the nature of the beast. So we’re always going to have to learn to live with fire, unfortunately. But we try to minimize the damages done to society. But unfortunately, communities are going to be impacted by fire. We can reduce the likelihood. But we’re never going to eliminate the risk. As long as there’s fire in the forest and we’re in the forest there, there’s gonna be consequences, unfortunately.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
Mike, thank you so much for this. I learned a ton.
Dr. Mike Flanagan
Glad to talk to you about fire anytime.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
I hope we don’t have to do it too often, but it’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Mike Flanagan
Oh, we’ve, we’ll be doing it again. Yes.
Jordan Heath Rawlings
Mike Flanagan of Thompson Rivers University, BC Research Chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science. That was The Big Story. If you’d like more head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. We covered these fires a couple of weeks ago, including their possible impact on the Alberta election if you’d like to go find that episode. If you’d like to find us to give us some feedback, we are on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. We always have our email box open. It’s hello@TheBigStory.ca. And our phone lines are also always open. We don’t answer them though. You gotta leave a message. 416-935-5935. You can get The Big Story in any podcast player you like. You can also find it on your smart speaker simply by asking it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.
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