When Extreme Fires Become Routine
By Ian Austen, NY Times, Aug. 24, 2018
It’s impossible to avoid this summer’s forest fire season in much of British Columbia and parts of Alberta. Smoky skies have turned the sun into a tangerine-colored ball and led to canceled sporting events and grounded flights. Wine producers in British Columbia are even worried about the smoke affecting the flavor of their grapes.
For people living close to the fires, of course, the situation is much more terrifying. Thousands have been ordered to evacuate, and many more have packed up their valuables and remain on alert to flee their communities.
Fires have also devastated the Western United States this summer. Residents and firefighters have been killed in Northern California, and more than one million acres have burned in that state. As in Western Canada, dry, hot weather related to climate change has played an important role in the catastrophe. But what actually causes the fires?
Here’s what Tim Arango, my colleague, found when he put that question to investigators: “Destructive wildfires nearly always begin with a human being, either intentionally or by mistake. There are endless ways people start fires--a discarded cigarette, a child playing with matches, a campfire, fireworks, a car accident.”
The people Tim interviewed include Edward Struzik, a fellow at the Queen’s Institute for Energy and Environmental Policy in Ontario and the author of “Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future,” which detailed a fire two years ago that forced 88,000 people to evacuate Fort McMurray, Alberta.
Mr. Struzik spoke with me from his home in Edmonton this week about the fires burning in Canada. (The interview has been edited and condensed.)
How exceptional have the recent fire seasons been in the West?
What we’re seeing now is something that we haven’t seen in the last 100 years. Fire is behaving in ways that are unpredictable and pretty frightening. There are a lot of reasons for it. We live in a part of the continent from California right up to Alaska that has really experienced most of what climate change offers: a lot of dry, hot weather, which produces very dry forests, and the hotter it gets, the more lightning you get.
Have forestry practices like tree planting after harvests contributed?
By simply replanting a merchantable piece of lumber, you’re making a complex ecosystem a lot more simplistic, and it’s just not good for it.
What you get in natural regeneration, say, in coniferous forests, you have the aspen shoots coming right back. They call the aspen “the asbestos tree.” They’re not easily ignited, especially when they’re young. They hold a lot of moisture in, so they don’t burn as well.
In Fort McMurray, one of the flaws of the fire suppression strategy was they had some really old vegetation maps. They thought that they had this big stand of aspen in between Fort McMurray and the fire front that would slow the fire.
How effective are we at putting out forest fires?
Once the fire gets to a certain size, say, a thousand hectares, and it’s being driven by wind and hot weather, there’s really nothing firefighters can do to put it out. They can steer a fire away, maybe, from buildings and communities. They can maybe slow a fire. But really, in the end Mother Nature has got to come in and put some moisture on those fires.
We need to give them the resources they need to keep people safe. But to think that they’re going to be able to put out fires--there’s just no way.
Then what should we be doing?
Too much attention is now focused on fighting these fires, rather than dealing with future fires. The problem right now with urban planning is that we don’t incorporate the threat of wildfire. Ninety-six percent of the communities in this country are vulnerable in some way to wildfire.
We subsidize people who want to buy an electric car to deal with climate change. Maybe we should have a program in place that makes homes and communities more resilient. Like, say, if you replace a cedar roof with a steel roof, you get a rebate. The cost of suppression and recovery is becoming so high that something’s got to be done. We can’t just keep opening the government’s wallet to bail people out year after year after year.
