These days, something’s always burning: A fire season preview

Jordan: These days, a fire’s always burning somewhere.

News clip: We’re well into the season already in parts of British Columbia and Alberta. There are a number of communities under evacuation alert this morning because of encroaching and encroaching flames.

Jordan: Wildfire season started in February this year. Now that in itself maybe shouldn’t scare you, but the scale of last season’s destruction, the drought that has gripped much of the prairies over the winter and the sheer force of the fires we see now that should, if there was a true shift in our consciousness into the current era of always on fires and blazes that can level entire towns. It probably happened around the time of the Fort McMurray fire, which ripped through one of Alberta’s biggest population centers with incredible speed and intensity. That was almost eight years ago. Fires have been evolving in the years since as even drier, even hotter conditions make them even more powerful. So we’ve had to evolve as well in the ways that we fight these fires, in the ways we build and maintain communities and in the way we acknowledge our new reality, which is, as I said these days, it’s always burning somewhere. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. John Vaillant is an American-Canadian writer and journalist. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and many other places. But we are talking to him today because of his acclaimed book released last year Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. Hey John.

John Valliant: Hello Jordan.

Jordan: For those who don’t recall it, maybe you can quickly take us back to the Fort McMurray fire that you wrote your book about. When did it become clear as the fire developed that this one was different?

John Valliant: Well it really happened all in one afternoon on May 3rd, Canadians were going about their business when their newsfeed was suddenly taken over by images of Fort McMurray, completely shrouded in smoke to the point that you could not see what was going on anywhere. And if you pulled up high enough, you could see cars streaming like ants down Highway 63 heading south and north out from under this smoke cloud. And nobody knew literally for days what was really going on under there. They just knew that some portion of the city was on fire, that people were evacuating as fast as they could, but nobody really knew who was left in there or how much of the city was left. It was a time of great uncertainty and it was really shocking because this wasn’t little old Slave Lake or enterprise, two other towns that had been burned over. This was really for Alberta, a major city. It’s the fourth largest city in the Subarctic, completely overtaken by fire. And that was a shock to the Canadian system for sure.

Jordan: Was it the speed or the intensity or the way it kind of ate up the town? What was it that was so shocking afterwards? When we looked back at it,

John Valliant: Speed is a big factor. I coined a term and Fire Weather, 21st century fire, and I call it that because it has different characteristics than we got used to in the 20th century. And one of the signal differences between 21st century fire and fires of the past is the extraordinary speed with which modern fire moves for several days. People in for McMurray, were looking at this big plume, actually several plumes on their horizon and that is nothing new in May in Fort McMurray. May is fire season up there and plumes are a common site on the horizon, but to go into your shower with a plume on horizon and come out of your shower with your friend telling you to pack up everything you have and evacuate immediately because the next neighborhood over is on fire. That’s new and that’s what happened and that’s how a lot of people in Fort McMurray found out they had to evacuate. And so the totality of it, the size of it, I mean a lot of people don’t know because people sort of think about this in a Canadian context, but the Fort McMurray fire drove the largest most rapid evacuation due to wildfire in modern times. That’s a global marker. That’s not just an Alberta or Canadian marker.

Jordan: Where does this new speed come from? What’s driving it that wasn’t present before?

John Valliant: We’re learning a lot about fire that we didn’t know and frankly didn’t want to know. I think of these moments that we’re in right now as a series of invisible thresholds and we’re crossing it with sea ice, we’re crossing it with sea temperature, we’re crossing it with fire behavior. And these are thresholds that we didn’t really necessarily even recognize before because we hadn’t crossed them before. But what we found in Fort McMurray was on the day of the fire and the days preceding and following the fire because the fire actually burnt inside Fort McMurray for many days, arguably weeks depending on how you want to measure it. The temperature was in the thirties and we’re talking about the subarctic here. It was around 33 Celsius on May 3rd, 2016. But more significant in a way was the relative humidity, which was 11%. And normally we don’t think about humidity in Toronto. You think, well, it’s a hot and humid day, but otherwise it doesn’t really come up. But who notices humidity acutely is fire and 11% humidity struck me as pretty low, but what do I know about humidity? And so I started looking around to find places in the world where 11% humidity was a normal level. Well, it turns out you have to go to Death Valley in southern California in the month of July to find an average relative humidity of 11%. So now you have something that is as dry as death Valley and effectively as hot as Southern California. It’s 33 Celsius except this is the Boreal forest, which is already a historically naturally flammable ecosystem. And now you’ve cranked up the heat and cranked down the humidity. And what that does is enlarge the space for ignition, for speed, for intensity and for temperature. And so now we had this kind of worst case scenario in an already flammable system with a city in the way, a horrible situation that nonetheless was totally predictable because Boreal fires in Canada are naturally huge and they will eventually burn the entire forest in a patchwork fashion. This is normal. This is part of how the Boreal forest regenerates itself. And it’s interesting to note now that Fort McMurray has grown itself back too. It’s sort of following the Boreal forest model burning down and rebuilding itself exactly the way it was before, which is okay for a forest. It is not okay for a petroleum city in the middle of a planet being altered radically by climate change.

Jordan: Your book is filled with descriptions of that fire and they’re descriptions from people who have seen lots of fires and fight these fires and know them and are not scared of them, but this fire is terrifying to them. What was it like talking to those people while reporting this book?

John Valliant: Oh, it was amazing. It was amazing to see pretty seasoned and salty professionals saying, yeah, I’ve been fighting fire for 20 years and they didn’t use to do this. And a guy I talked to in southern California after the Redding Fire, he said, yeah, we’re used to big hot fires in California, but they didn’t use to moonscape. And what he’s talking about is the total destruction and cauterization of the earth reducing an inhabited forested region to what looked to him like a moonscape. And likewise, we’re sadly much more familiar with it now, but when those first images of the annihilated neighborhoods of Fort McMurray began emerging, most of us hadn’t seen anything like that before. That was really quite a new vision. And if you think about it, a lot of the most famous destructive fires that we’re familiar with now, the terrible fires that burnt through Australia, a lot of the really bad fires that have burnt across California, Oregon, Washington, Chile, Greece, Spain, Portugal, all of those were post 2016, so our eyes weren’t familiar with the idea of a neighborhood that had been absolutely flattened. That’s a different kind of energy. And the heat coming out of the fire that entered Fort McMurray and took it over was about 500 Celsius, and that is hotter than the planet Venus.

Jordan: Wow.

John Valliant: There’s nothing on planet Venus, and it’s amazing to think that these neighborhoods where children were playing were within the space of an hour transformed into a completely unlivable planet.

Jordan: As these fires have grown in intensity and speed and everything else you describe, have our firefighting techniques evolved and changed with them to battle them more effectively? Like I guess this is a push and pull here. Are we catching up?

John Valliant: No. I talked to firefighters in Fort Mac and California and elsewhere, and one of the things they told me was one of the indicators of 21st century fire in their words is the firefighting operation turns into a lifesaving operation. In other words, the fire is simply too big and too hot to combat. And so these firefighters who are trained to fight fire are not able to do so, and all they can do now is try to get as many people out alive as possible.

Jordan: In your book, you describe a WUI or a “wooey” and maybe explain to us what that is and how screwed we are from that perspective.

John Valliant: Well, I don’t think we’re screwed. The WUI, the wildland urban interface, is the place where the built environment butts up against the forest, and that’s about 50% of Canadian communities. About 30% of American communities are one way or another in the WUI, and in my view, the west end of Vancouver qualifies as the WUI because Stanley Park is right there at their doorstep. And if Stanley Park catches on fire, a whole lot of energy is going to be coming into the neighborhoods of the west end of Vancouver. But most people think of the WUI as rural communities, which are abundant all over Canada, and that is where a lot of big fire comes from. And what we need to do now is kind of renegotiate our relationship to fire because it is capable of things now that it didn’t used to be except under really exceptional circumstances. Now it’s capable of those things every summer.

Jordan: How should we be rebuilding a community like Fort Mac or how should we be adapting our current communities that are in this kind of path to be better prepared against this type of fire? Is there anything we can do that would help with that?

John Valliant: There are things we can do, and I don’t believe Fort McMurray is doing them. Fort McMurray is a really anomalous case that is a city in climate denial, in a province in climate denial. These are people who will not discuss it. They rebuilt Fort McMurray in its old image, but bigger. It could very easily burn again exactly the same way that it did the first time. Fort McMurray appeared on May 2nd to be inviolable. It has the Athabasca River that’s half a kilometer wide. It has huge transmission corridors, pipeline quarters. It’s got a super highway. It has all these natural and unnatural firebreaks built in, and it does not matter now because the embers will transcend any barrier you can put up. And because it’s a little bit hotter and a little bit drier, it means those embers can fly farther and land hotter. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that we can pick as far as hardening our communities against the intrusion of a wildfire. And Canada has a nationwide program called FireSmart, which operates through local fire departments. And these folks will come to your cul-de-sac, come your backyard and look around and help you figure out how to make your property less flammable, how to make your community less flammable. And I am fully convinced that every community can reduce its potential flammability by double digit percentages no matter where they are. We can’t have a hundred fire proofness, but we can reduce the risk a lot more than it is right now. So I feel pretty optimistic about that despite the fact that we’re in for another pinger of a fire season, we could have easily have a redux of 2023.

Jordan: That was also going to be my next question, which is when you saw earlier this year, that fire season had been declared officially started, I believe it was in late February. What was your reaction?

John Valliant: My reaction was people seem to be paying attention. I think if there were fires of that kind say in 1996, it wouldn’t have gotten much notice, but I think people really are on alert now, especially in western Canada, but they really should be all the way across Canada because I know for a fact that the Midwest of the United States, and so that means also Quebec and Ontario, at least in the south, are quite dry. And there have already been fires in Minnesota and I think some neighboring states. So I mean, on the one hand, it’s totally alarming and unnerving. On the other hand, it has been predicted and people haven’t really been paying attention, frankly to what climate science have been saying really for 50 years. This has been predicted for 50 years, and people are really attached to their status quo, and it does not suit the petroleum industry to pay attention to climate change or take any responsibility for it. And unfortunately, most Canadian governments, local and federal have gone along with that. And now we’ve had some hell to pay and it’s going to keep going. And so it’s a pretty brutal wake up. And declaring fire season in February is a good start, but what we really need to declare is a climate emergency and respond appropriately, which is by decarbonizing ASAP.

Jordan: When you say we could be in for a repeat of last year in terms of fire season, how predictable is fire season anymore based on what you’ve seen now based on, I know there are fires burning on many places in the country already. I believe somebody pointed out to me that some of the ones from last year never really went out. How much can we predict right now about what this summer will look like?

John Valliant: I think we can make a really educated guess just by looking at temperature trends which are going relentlessly upward. In fact, 2023 took a big jump. We’re really, Jordan, in a new regime now, if you look at any indicator of climate distress, sea surface temperatures, north and south, Antarctic ice loss, alpine glacier loss in Europe, air temperature, all of these are jumping into new extremes. They’re not trending gently. They’re actually lurching upward. And 2023 was a pivotal year, and unfortunately Canada kind of led the way. We haven’t yet talked about pyrocumulonimbus fire systems, but these are these enormous fire systems that big fires are able to generate that function. Almost like hurricanes. They turn counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere, they rise up through the stratosphere, they generate their own lightning, they generate their own hail. They can actually perpetuate the fire for as long as the fuel holds out. And these used to be a real anomaly. In fact, they typically occur over volcanoes historically. That’s where you see them, the black cloud with a lightning in it. Now that’s happening over wildfires. And that again, is relatively new. It was not unheard of in the 20th century, but it is now a feature of big fires in the 21st century and Canada last season, 2023 generated 142 pyrocumulonimbus fire systems, and that is unheard of and unknown in all of human history. That’s what happened last year, and things are only getting warmer. El Nino is finally wrapping itself up. It’s usually a two year cycle. The second year is often more intense. This is the second year of it while it’s officially ended, its impacts in terms of drawing and warming have not, they kind of ripple onward. So there’s every reason to suppose and every reason to prepare for a very vigorous fire season across the country.

Jordan: The last thing I want to ask about is one of the things that I really took away from your book and the interviews you conduct is about failures of imagination in terms of what a fire can do versus what it’s expected to do and what the climate might do. And then the reality that we saw. Now that we’ve seen these types of fires proliferate, are our imagination still failing us or do we now have a grasp on even though these fires are worse and faster and more intense, we understand what we’re facing now in a way we didn’t maybe back in 2016?

John Valliant: That’s a really important question, and it really gets, I think, to the essence of human nature. And understandably, we base our experience on things that have happened before. So we’re not that good at predicting the future or imagining things that have never happened. Like the idea of Halifax burning in the 21st century was really unimaginable until it happened. And likewise, to have fires burning practically from coast to coast all summer long, that was also really hard for us to imagine. But this is an advantage that climate change has over us. There’s a real hold my beer quality to the outrageous climate change is capable of. We’ve been shown that now over and over again that it can do things that we simply can’t imagine. It can generate a tornado out of a fire, it can drop a meter of rain on a community, and these are things that just didn’t use to happen in nature, and now they do. And so we have been warned, but there is still this kind of knee jerk allegiance that we have to our status quo to the way we used to do things, to the way we quote always did things. And that is really going to come back and bite us because as I’ve said and as nature has shown us, we are in a new regime now and we need to step up to that. And when you have a pretty hidebound petroleum industry, for example, it’s going to be slow to change and change feels expensive. Change isn’t always popular with voters. You look at the slogans of the American right, which is Make America Great Again, which means basically go backwards. Go backwards to a world that frankly never existed and never will exist now. So we really have to go forward and forward means including this new possibility of a more flammable Canada and adapting accordingly. And it’s something we’re fully capable of doing, but it’s going to require meaningful buy-in at the local level and at the federal level.

Jordan: John, thank you so much for this, and thank you for the book. I really enjoyed it. Enjoyed it. Might be too strong a word, but I felt it profoundly. So thank you.

John Valliant: Thanks Jordan and everybody. I really appreciate your interest.

Jordan: John Vaillant, writer and journalist, author of Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. It is seriously a great book. That was The Big Story, and you can find more of our podcasts at The Big Story podcast.ca. Don’t forget to check out yesterday’s episode, the first episode of Pay Dirt, the inside story of Ontario’s Green Belt scandal. It is a new type of thing we’re doing on this show. We hope you’ll love it. If you want to send us feedback about that or any other little thing that’s on your mind, you can send us an email hello at The Big Story podcast.ca is where to send that. And you can call and leave a voicemail. The number is 416-935-5935. The Big Story’s in every single podcast player, and it’s on every single smart speaker, even the ones in your car. Just tell ’em to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.