Massive '21st-century' fires are here to stay — and we need to update how we fight them, says author
John Vaillant says intense wildfires here ‘for the rest of our lives'
Intense wildfires are devastating parts of the Northwest Territories and British Columbia. But for as frightening as they've been, journalist John Vaillant believes these expansive, destructive fires are our new norm.
"This is going to be with us for the rest of our lives, and that's a really painful thing to consider," he told The Current guest host Susan Bonner. "This is not a freak event."
Wildfires have been the story of this Canadian summer, dominating headlines and devastating communities from the country's north to its south.
Thousands of Canadians in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia have been uprooted to evacuation centres in recent weeks — often very far from home, with no sign of when they can return.
Vaillant, who researched and wrote about the 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray, Alta., for his book Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, says we're seeing more large-scale and energetic fires due, in part, to centuries of carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
Here's part of his conversation with Bonner.
How are you thinking this morning about these massive fires in B.C. and the Northwest Territories?
What we're seeing is a really terrifying replay of what in 2016 was a massive, but at least kind of isolated event, in the form of Fort McMurray, and the idea of dealing with fires on that scale.
Kelowna, [B.C.,] Yellowknife — there are actually a thousand fires burning across the country right now as of Sunday. So I'm really nervous, and I think a lot of the people listening and a lot of the people watching the smoke on their respective horizons are really uncertain.
Being at the mercy of the weather — which Fort McMurray was, which Yellowknife is now, which Fort Smith, [N.W.T.,] is now — it's kind of a disempowering position to be in.
People are watching the sky in this very old-fashioned, kind of ancient way, looking for the signs. And in the meantime, we're living in the modern world, trying to live at that pace with the kinds of safety that we expect. And we don't have it, that security isn't there anymore.
I feel like there's a, kind of, massive national reckoning underway with these massive new changes that we're facing.
You mentioned Fort McMurray, Alberta.... What have we learned from those fires that we're seeing now applied here?
I think the most important one, Susan, is a pre-emptive evacuation. Anyone who's been through a rushed evacuation … it's terrifying in a way that is really hard to convey unless you've been in it.
The scenes that were described to me just recently, but also in Fort McMurray, are harrowing. And when you evacuate pre-emptively, as people have done from Yellowknife, it's a colossal inconvenience. It's a temporarily life-changing inconvenience. But, you are avoiding much worse traumas that way, and you're also saving lives — really, untold lives. You can't put a price on that.
I think when all is said and done, even if the fire doesn't enter Yellowknife … you'll be really glad that you took those precautions.
I want to ask you how you think fires have changed since you started tracking them.
I call it 21st-century fire in the book, and that's because right around 2000, we started seeing much more explosive conditions — and B.C. and Alberta were really on the front lines of that.
The Okanagan [Mountain] Park fire in 2003 lost 250 structures and people were seeing scenes very similar to what we just saw in Kelowna; these entire hillsides in flames and dozens of homes going up at once, and really frightening evacuations.... That really gives people a lot of anxiety and rightly so.
So what we're seeing are these massive, explosively energetic fires that are the result of centuries at this point of relentless CO2 generation from industrial fossil fuels — and also this steady drying of the landscape. The boreal is really going through a massive, slow-motion transformation right now and turning into a much more flammable place.
And are governments and first responders prepared for that?
No, they're not. And we … as a planet are playing a really awkward game of catch-up.
We're seeing that play out in real-time in places like Yellowknife and Fort Smith and Kelowna, where firefighters are literally inventing new firefighting techniques on the fly, that are integrating municipal techniques with wildfire techniques.
Up in Yellowknife and in that area, they've got now gigantic sprinkler systems running not through fire hoses, but through 12-inch lines almost like small culverts that are able to shower entire communities in water and create massive water curtains. This is pretty new, but it really can save communities.
What we're being invited to do now in the most brutal way is to update to 21st-century standards of fire, and we're seeing people do that. You know, we're on the back foot right now. But as we heard from … Yellowknife, you know, they're getting a grip on it.
How do you see our relationship to fire changing in the coming days ... to coming decades, really?
I started writing about Fort McMurray in 2016 because I could see then this was not a freak event. I saw Chisholm, saw Okanagan Park, saw Slave Lake, saw California and said, "OK, you know, fire is entering a kind of new age of intensity, and we're going to have to catch up to that."
It moves faster, it burns hotter, it flies farther on the wind in the form of embers. Those embers are more likely to ignite wherever they land than they used to be.
That's what we're discovering in really painful ways.... But that we're alive, most of us are safe, and we're seeing this — and when you see it, you become a believer. It's not an abstract thing anymore.
Now there are literally tens of thousands — honestly, hundreds of thousands — of Canadians now who've been through this just this summer.
That's going to change the culture — and it has to.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Produced by Arman Aghbali
