Burning out: B.C. wildfire fighters share stories from the frontlines
With Los Angeles ablaze, it’s time we start thinking about wildfires year-round. That includes listening to the humans protecting us from a powerful force of nature — and the struggles firefighters face beyond the frontlines
Wildland firefighters are on the front lines of climate change. Adapting to our new wildfire reality means thinking about the humans protecting us.
Photo: Marty Clemens / The Narwhal
“It’s like someone turned the fire switch on and it’s just not stopping.”
That’s what wildfire ecologist Kira Hoffman told me in November, as we discussed our new wildfire reality. I can’t help but think back to that conversation today, as we watch the out-of-control blazes burn Los Angeles, putting at least 180,000 residents under evacuation orders and engulfing entire neighbourhoods in the second-largest U.S. city. It’s all happening in January, a month that should have brought some rain to southern California; instead, the region is drought-stricken and bone dry.
It points to an uncomfortable reality: we need to be thinking about wildfires year-round, and not just when fires are actively burning where we live.
Why? For a sprawling feature I published today, I talked to a handful of frontline firefighters in British Columbia, where I live, who bear quite the brunt of wildfire impacts. Take Jessica Broder for example: a former wildland firefighter who hung up her hardhat at the end of 2023 after three years. She’d worked over 100 days that season — more than double what Hoffman worked in her entire firefighting career two decades ago. The cumulative fatigue of dealing with traumatic events year after year, with no time to properly process them, simply became too much.
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Jessica Broder fought wildfires in B.C. for three years, two of which were noted as the worst wildfire seasons in the province’s history. Photo: Kari Medig / The Narwhal
Last year was the planet’s hottest on record and the first to exceed 1.5 C warming above pre-industrial levels. Rising temperatures are fuelling droughts like the persistent one in the Los Angeles area, where fire hydrants are running dry as high winds continue to fan the flames. This is our shared reality and every single one of us is affected by it, no doubt — whether it’s smoke blanketing cities hundreds of kilometres away from burning forests, the economic impacts of rising insurance rates or communities burning to the ground.
For every wildfire that threatens a community or burns on the horizon, there are living, breathing human beings on the ground fighting to protect us from one of the most powerful forces of nature. And as they’re pushed to contend with monstrous flames in unsuspecting months, it might just be a call for us to start thinking about wildfires, and how we need to adapt to them, even in the winter.
That’s why I spent time getting to know some of the firefighters keeping our communities safe year after year. Here are some of their stories — and I hope you’ll take some time to sit with it.
Take care and set your heart on fire,
Matt Simmons Northwest B.C. reporter
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Wildland firefighters are on the front lines of climate change. Adapting to our new wildfire reality means thinking about the humans protecting us.
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