By Ed Struzik for The Tyee.

While doing research for a book I was writing on wildfire, I posed two questions to a number of experts: “Do you think there will be another Fort McMurray-like fire in the future? If so, where do you think it will happen?”

Everyone agreed on the first question. Fort McMurray was not an anomaly. It will happen again, sooner rather than later, and likely with deadly consequences.

The responses to the second question varied. University of Alberta wildfire scientist Mike Flannigan had many First Nations communities, Prince George in British Columbia and Timmins in northern Ontario high on his list.

Cliff White, a former Parks Canada scientist and one of the architects of the agency’s wildfire management program, suggested that Sulphur Mountain in Banff could burn, endangering thousands of hikers and tourists.

Wildfire scientists Brian Stocks and Marty Alexander cast a broader net. They suggested that hundreds of communities are at risk.

Glenn McGillivray, the managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, offered the most surprising response. He had Victoria and Vancouver on his list. (If you think McGillvray is exaggerating, consider the fact he predicted in a blog that a fire would threaten Fort McMurray two years before it happened.)

As this year’s fire season in British Columbia has demonstrated, the experts I talked to were right in answering the first question. Time will tell whether they will be right in answering the second. But they will almost certainly be.

The province of B.C. declared a state of emergency on July 7, 2017 due to wildfires. Photo: Province of B.C.

Bigger, Hotter, Faster

The last decade has been the warmest continent-wide. Hotter weather dries the forest and produces more lightning. Lightning is responsible for most of the biggest wildfires that occur in Canada, although people cause more wildland fires than lightning strikes.

More people are living, working and recreating in the forest. There are more mature trees in the forest landscape as a result of decades of aggressive firefighting efforts. Tens of millions of these trees are dead or dying thanks to insects and disease that strike aging trees and the warming that is taking place.

It all adds up to fires burning bigger, hotter, faster and more often.

Everyone agrees that this will result in more evacuations, more homes and businesses being burned, more roads and recreation areas being closed, more smoke imperilling the health of people, especially the young, the elderly and those with respiratory problems. First Nations, which represent only four per cent of the population, will be hit especially hard. They are already affected by a third of the evacuations that take place in a given year.

Water quality will also suffer. The carbon that spills into the river systems can seriously compromise water treatment facilities, especially in places such as Victoria that do not filter water because the high quality water supply does not require them to do so.

Members of the RCMP search the wreckage of the Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016. Photo: RCMP

Fort Mac Sparked Little Change

Fort McMurray should have been the catalyst for changing the way we deal with wildfire. That blaze sent approximately 88,000 people fleeing their homes, offices, hospitals, schools, and seniors’ residences. By the time rains and cooler temperatures helped firefighters contain the fires, 2,800 homes and buildings were destroyed. Nearly 1.5 million acres burned. Insurance losses were expected to amount to $3.77 billion. The total cost of the fire, including financial, physical, and social factors, is likely to be $8.86 billion.

But has anyone in government been listening?

The government of Ontario has embarked on a policy that will allow some fires to burn themselves out so long as they don’t threaten people and commerce. This policy, which preceded Fort McMurray, will go a long way toward making forests there resilient.

But that’s just about it for the bold strategies that outgoing B.C. Premier Christy Clark and her provincial colleagues seemed to call for last year when they supported the idea of a national wildfire strategy. That’s gone nowhere.

The government of Alberta’s response so far to recommendations from an expert review panel that investigated the Fort McMurray fire has been muted at best. More money has been allotted to the FireSmart Program, which helps communities thin urban-edge forests, remove burnable fuel on the ground and around homes, and create defendable boundaries from which fires can be fought.

But it’s not nearly enough. And as Marty Alexander points out, a good chunk of the funding was given to Fort McMurray where the fires of 2016 have already removed most of the dangerous fuels from the ground.

Alberta has strengthened some wildfire protection laws but not those that matter most. The government has been reluctant to enforce existing laws (closing forests in times of extreme drought and heat) that minimize the chance of fires igniting. Alberta has promised to improve fire weather forecasting, but has offered few details.

Image of raging fire 16 kilometres south of Fort McMurray in 2016. Photo: CTV News Youtube screenshot 

Instead of recognizing the dangers that lie ahead, the Alberta government has chosen to treat Fort McMurray as an “extreme event.” It’s not the only government that is guilty of doing this.

Lost in the collective memory of the politicians who rotate in and out of office are the so-called extreme wildfire events of the recent past which are not so rare anymore: Salmon Arm, B.C. and Virginia Hills, Alberta in 1998; the Chisholm and House River fires of 2001 and 2002 in Alberta; West Kelowna, Okanagan Mountain Park, Kootenay, Banff, Jasper, Crowsnest Pass in 2003; the Yukon in 2004; La Tuque in northern Quebec in 2010; Slave Lake and the Richardson fires in 2011; northern Quebec in 2013; the Northwest Territories in 2014; the 2015 fire season, which was the most intense fire season of the century in western North America.

As the current situation in B.C. is demonstrating once again, these extreme events are now the new normal. In Canada, wildfires that burned more than 200,000 hectares of forest happened only four times between 1970 and 1990. Since then they have done so 12 times.

The provinces are not totally at fault. The federal government has done little to support forest science. The Canadian Forest Service used to employ 2,400 people. It now employs about 700. Most of the service’s research money goes to the study of insect infestations that impact the timber industry. The total funding is justified given the nature of the problem and the value of the industry. But less than eight per cent goes to fire research.

“Given the relative importance of fire and insects in Canadian forests, how is this disparity possible?” asks Brian Stocks, who had a long career in the forest service.  

Bigger, Hotter, Faster: Canada’s #Wildfires are Changing and We’re Not Ready https://t.co/cX2EH9KHGO #bcpoli #bcwildfire #climate @kujjua

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) July 17, 2017

People in and out of government kept telling me that the important thing about Fort McMurray was that no one died. They are right to an extent, but they are also wrong because loss of life is not necessarily the best way of measuring success. Fort McMurray was the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. It could have been much worse if so many things — wind, demographics (Fort Mac has relatively few elderly people), safety training (most everyone in the oil sands industry knows what to do in an emergency), quick and creative thinking, heroism and outright luck — hadn’t aligned in the manners they did.

Fort McMurray dodged a lot of bullets, as the town of Slave Lake did in 2011 when everyone had to evacuate at the last minute. Those in the line of fire in the future may not be so fortunate if the provinces and the federal government fail to come to grips with the mounting challenges.

The blueprint for the future was spelled out in 2005 when Brian Stocks and a veritable who’s who of wildfire experts were asked by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers to come up with a new wildlands fire strategy. Most of those recommendations have been ignored.

Ed Struzik’s book Firestorm, How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future is being published by Island Press in Washington, D.C and distributed in Canada by the University of British Columbia Press in October 2017.

Image: Canadian Armed Forces survey B.C. wildfires from the air. Photo: MCpl Gabrielle DesRochers, Canadian Forces Combat Camera via Flickr

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Connecting extreme weather events with climate change isn’t exactly a new thing.

After Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York and New Jersey in 2012, Bloomberg published a front page spread proclaiming, “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

For years, major storms, droughts, floods and fires have been connected to climate change. The climate angle was even fair game during last summer’s wildfires in western Canada.

So how did the climate conversation around the still-raging Fort McMurray wildfire that destroyed thousands of homes become so befuddling-ly messed up?

Conversations about climate change as a factor in the wildfires has garnered about as much attention as the wildfires themselves. For a recap of the “middle-finger salutes,” schadenfreude and #tinyviolins mock-sympathy for the people of Fort McMurray, check out this article on Slate.

(Add in, May 12: It's worthwhile to point out that while there were a lot of unfortunate aspects of the public conversation about the fire, many environmental NGOs rallied their organizational capacity to raise money and basic support for evacuees. The executive directors of Canada's most prominent environmental groups including the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Ecology Ottawa, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, Greenpeace, LeadNow, Sierra Club, Stand and West Coast Environmental Law urged support for evacuees in a joint press release published Friday, May 6.)

Cara Pike, climate communications expert with Climate Access, says the urge to link what’s happening in Fort McMurray to climate change should be tempered by a keen sensitivity to the very real human suffering on the ground.

“We need to lead with our humanity,” Pike told DeSmog Canada. “This is a good time to listen very, very hard to what people are dealing with, what they care about, what they want for their futures and try to find those common places.”

The rush to draw the connection between the Fort Mac fires and climate change could come across as blaming, Pike said, adding “I really personally question the timing and how best to have that conversation.”

How the #FortMcMurray #Climate Conversation Went Down in Flames https://t.co/mW2XSHVfYG #fortmacfire #ableg #cdnpoli

— DeSmog Canada (@DeSmogCanada) May 10, 2016

Canada is still behind the U.S. when it comes to understanding that climate impacts are happening here and now, Pike says. In the U.S., major hurricanes such as Katrina, Irene and Sandy, massive wildfires and long-term drought brought the climate change message to the forefront.

Pike was vice president of communications at Earth Justice during Hurricane Katrina and notes many local environmental groups were criticized for using the disaster to advance their campaigns.

“What happened there with Katrina is a parallel of what we’re seeing now with Fort McMurray,” she said.

In the case of Fort McMurray, the conversation is made “more visceral” by the tragedy occurring in an oil-producing region, Pike said.

“It creates so much more discomfort when trying to have that conversation because it inherently brings us to a place where people feel judged and blamed,” she said.

“The truth is that everyone is tied to oil and unfortunately in environmental communications there is often this dominant tone of self-righteousness. And in these crisis moments, when people put on their professional hats and go talk about these issues, it’s like they lose their humanity.”

Part of the problem lies in the polarization that infiltrates nearly every energy and environment debate in Canada — and which has emotions roiling at the surface, unleashed at the slightest provocation.

“There’s no formula for when it’s appropriate to talk about climate change,” Simon Donner, associate professor of Climatology at the University of British Columbia, told DeSmog Canada. “I think it just really depends on the circumstances of any extreme event.”

“It’s not a good idea to use people’s suffering to push an agenda, even if that agenda is scientifically defensible,” Donner said.

Underlining the current debate is the fact the fires are happening in the heart of Canada’s oilsands.

“Everyone knows what the industry is in Fort McMurray. Everyone knows that’s a source of opposition to climate policy in Canada and underneath a lot of people’s good intentions is a sense of ‘I told you so.’ What I’m saying is, let’s be nice to folks, you don’t have to be self-righteous about it.”

As a climate communicator, Donner said it’s always crucial to consider your audience.

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“If your goal for talking about climate change after an extreme event is to engage people in that community, but the community that was affected by the event is suspicious about the science of climate change, pivoting in the media to climate change while their homes are burning is just going to alienate people,” Donner said.

“It doesn’t seem like a smart way to engage the part of Canada that is resistant to action to combat climate change,” Donner added. “We need to ask: what’s effective?”

Renee Lertzman, an expert in the psychology of environmental education, said it really isn’t a question of whether we make the connection between the fires and climate change but how.

“This conversation needs to happen, but it doesn’t need to be polarizing,” Lertzman told DeSmog Canada. “The question is how can we communicate and engage with people in the most constructive and productive and effective ways?”

“We’re designed to resist challenging, threatening news and information that can potentially challenge our worldview.” Lertzman noted.

She said it can be frustrating to see climate communications that seem to “miss entirely how humans process information, particularly distressing and stressful information.”

“Climate change is really complicated in what it brings up for us. It really is, in a way, in its own category.”

That doesn’t mean it’s always inappropriate to discuss climate change in the context of disaster or tragedy.

By focusing on how all affected parties can work together to avoid tragedy, you generate feelings of inclusion and sensitivity, Lertzman said — opening the space for compassionate communications.

“It’s not about whether we make those connections, it’s about thinking through how humans deal with the trauma and acknowledging profound horror and devastation.”

Image: Fort McMurray Fire Pictures/Facebook

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By Ed Struzik for The Tyee.

A sudden shift in the wind at a critical time of day was all it took to send a wildfire out of control through Fort McMurray, forcing more than 80,000 people out of their homes in what has become the biggest natural disaster in Canadian history.

Earlier this week, Darby Allen, the regional fire chief for the area, minced no words when he was asked what might happen now that more than 1,600 homes have been destroyed.

''This is a really dirty fire,'' he said. ''There are certainly areas within the city which have not been burned, but this fire will look for them and it will take them.''

The media line now is that fire experts saw this coming five years ago when one of the Flattop Complex fires tore through the Alberta town of Slave Lake in 2011, forcing everyone to leave on a moment's notice. A report released shortly after predicted that something similar could happen again, and its authors made 21 recommendations to prepare for the possibility.

But fire scientists and fire managers actually saw this coming back in 2009 when 70 of them gathered in Victoria to address the issue of climate change and what impact it was going to have on the forest fire situation in Canada. Each one of them was already well aware that fires were burning bigger, hotter, faster, and in more unpredictable ways than ever before.

''We're exceeding thresholds all the time,'' said Mike Flannigan, who was at the time a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. ''We'd better start acting soon.''

''We let 150 wildfires burn each year and we need to be more transparent about that,'' said Judi Beck, Manager of Fire Management for BC Wildfire Management Branch. ''The public needs to know what we can and can't do.''


Gordon Miller, a director general with the Canadian Forest Service, summed it up succinctly, saying, ''More fires mean more communities will be at risk.''

'Strongest Signal Yet'

Flannigan is now a professor and research scientist at the University of Alberta. He remembers the meeting well because the participants were so bluntly honest about what they knew, what they didn't know, and what needed to be done.

''Many of us saw a Fort McMurray-like situation coming back then and even earlier, but frankly none of us expected anything as horrific as what has happened there this week. This is a signal, one of many, and the strongest we've seen yet, that suggests that the fire situation is going to get a lot worse, and that in some cases, there will not be much we can do about it other than evacuate communities.''

Flannigan declined to say whether enough has been done to prevent or better manage what has happened in Fort McMurray. ''Things are much too raw right now,'' he said, ''and we don't have all of the information and facts yet.''

But some Fort McMurray residents are beginning to question why it happened and why it took so long to tell people to get out. ''They evacuated us so late,'' resident Crystal Mercredi told CBC's The Current. ''So late that people were stuck in traffic and people were calling the radio station, saying… 'We're bumper-to-bumper. We can't move. Come and save us…we're sitting ducks.''' Another woman couldn't believe the elementary school that her child attended was evacuated just an hour before it burned down.

It's not that no one has been listening. This year, governments started preparing for the fire season a month earlier, as the Flattop report recommended. And efforts are underway to make many communities fire smart.

$9 Billion Catastrophe

But the fact is many decision-makers have been in denial or slow to move in addressing the fact that climate change is the new dragon in the forest, and that El Niño events like this year's make these dragons more volatile. The Alberta government this year reduced the fire prevention and management budget by $14.6 million.

Along with B.C. Premier Christy Clark, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall wants a national fire strategy but he refuses to accept the fact that something needs to be done to address climate change, which is the main reason why the area burned in Canada each year has doubled since the 1970s and why the number of fires is likely to double or even triple in the decades to come. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley is sincere about addressing climate change, but not at the expense of ramping up oilsands and fossil fuel production, which is driving climate change.

It's skewed logic when you look at the numbers the Bank of Montreal put out on Thursday. Its economists predict that insurance claims arising from the Fort McMurray fires could be as high as $9 billion. And that's just a small part of a bigger picture that's been emerging.

Unheeded alarms, then exodus: Experts warned in 2009 that wildfire risks in Canada's boreal forests were hugely spiking. Alberta cut its firefighting budget this year. Source: RCMP Alberta.

Since 2011, boreal forest fires in Canada, the United States and Russia have destroyed more trees than all that were burned in the rainforests of the world. Canada and the U.S. now rank second and fourth among countries with the greatest amount of annual tree loss. Russia, which is home to the world's biggest boreal forest, tops the list.

The growing cost of fighting wildfires is already overwhelming the ability of governments to manage their forests. For the first time, the government of Alberta couldn't fight all of the fires it wanted to fight in 2015 even though it brought in help from Mexico and Australia at one point to save some oilsands operations. And for the first time in Canada, wildfire management costs associated with the fires of 2015 topped the $1-billion mark.

Climate Change: The Big Dry Out

There are a number of reasons why fires are going to burn bigger, hotter, faster, and more often in the future. There are more people living and working in the boreal forest, and like it or not, people start a lot of fires — more than half that occur in Canada. And in fighting fires so religiously to protect valuable timber, oilsands, pipelines and communities, we've created an unnaturally large amount of old growth forest in the boreal, where spruce and pine are prevalent and highly combustible.

But there isn't an expert out there who doubts that climate change is the biggest reason why we're losing the battle to control wildfires.

For every one degree of warming, there needs to be 15 per cent more precipitation to keep the fine combustible fuels on the ground sufficiently moist. So if temperatures rise by about three degrees by the end of the century, which is as conservative an estimate as there is, we'll need 45 per cent more rain. Flannigan says there is nothing in the climate models that suggest we'll come close. In fact, we're likely to get less precipitation in some areas.

More heat is also going to result in more lighting, which currently accounts for 85 per cent of the area burned in Canada. Typically, lightning occurs in clusters where there can be 50 to 100 strikes in a day. But increasingly we're seeing lightning events such as the one that occurred in Alaska last year when a slow-moving storm unleashed 50,000 lightning strikes in just five days. More than five million acres of trees were destroyed in a fire season that turned out to be second worst in the state's history. No one had ever seen anything like it.

What's more, insects like the mountain pine beetle and the spruce bark beetle that kill or weaken mature spruce and pine will continue to proliferate in these warmer environments, adding fuel for combustion.

A perfect firestorm: As climate change dries out forests, humans operating there hold back burns until conditions exist for huge conflagrations like this one ravaging Fort McMurray's environs. Source: Alberta RCMP.

One way to mitigate the problem is to let more fires burn. But in Alberta where there are so many oilsands, pipelines and fracking operations, that's almost impossible to do.

Letting fires burn in more remote places is also risky because there's the potential that it will get out of control. The only way to stop a fire like that is to light another one in front of it to starve it of fuel.

This can only be done when the winds are relatively calm and when there is a break in the topography that allows fire fighters to anchor in.

Will Oilsands Combust?

The chances of oilsands bitumen catching fire are remote because it is mixed with sand and very difficult to ignite. Most of it is buried in subterranean conditions where there is very little oxygen to feed a fire. What's more worrisome is the peat that lies beneath the boreal forest. If a forest fire is sufficiently hot enough, it can burn deep into the peat and smoulder through the winter, potentially destroying seedlings and re-igniting once the snow melts in spring.

Ted Schuur has spent the better part of his career making the connection between climate change and wildfires. If more fires begin to burn through layers of moss, leaves, and other organic materials that insulate permafrost from surface heat, says the Northern Arizona University scientist, they could release vast amounts of carbon as there is twice as much carbon trapped in permafrost as in the atmosphere.

''As more and more of this carbon is released from the permafrost, temperatures are going to rise even faster,'' he says. ''Permafrost carbon may not be as visible as changes in sea ice, but you can bet that big changes are happening there and it's going to have a big impact on the future.''

Some experts are now talking about the possibility of a 3.5-million-hectare fire that will exceed anything we have seen in North America in the past 150 years.

Chinchaga as Recurring Nightmare

No one knows what such a fire would look like, but the Chinchaga Firestorm of 1950 gives us an idea. It burned for 222 days and torched a stretch of forest that was 280 kilometres long.

It had been an exceptionally hot spring, just as it has been in western Canada this year, when a small wildfire ignited in northern British Columbia. Firefighters were too busy battling other fires to do anything about a little fire like this, which was remote and relatively far from human settlement.

Within a few days though, it crossed into the wildlands of Alberta where the tinder dry forest went on forever. A giant pall of smoke from the blaze led some people in the south to believe that an atomic bomb had exploded.

It was not an alien invasion, a volcanic eruption or an eclipse of the sun as others suspected. At one point though, flights in Canada and the U.S. had to be cancelled. In Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Fort Erie and many towns in New York, it was so dark at mid-day that lights in baseball fields, including those at Yankee Stadium, had to be turned on. Smoke from the fire travelled all the way to Europe. Some Danish people were so jittery when they woke up to see a blue sun rising over the horizon that they went to the bank to withdraw their life savings.

It wasn't just people who were affected. One farmer in Jamestown, New York, described how his chickens, which had fanned out for their midday foraging, suddenly realized they were being caught by darkness, so they scurried back across the cow yard in more than usual earnest, their heads moving in delayed jerks.''

Astronomer Carl Sagan was so intrigued by the Chinchaga fire that he looked into the event to see how it might fit into his concept of a ''nuclear winter.''

According to Flannigan and fire expert Cordy Tymstra, who recently wrote a book on the fire, Chinchaga changed the way we fight fires. But they also say that the time has come to rethink much of what we have learned since then because there will be many more fires, and more assets — small towns, oil fields, pipelines, mines, lodges, and endangered species — that will be in the line of fire.

"I liken Slave Lake and Fort McMurray to a bloody nose," says Flannigan. "Sometimes we need to suffer several bloody noses before we change our behaviour." 

Images: Alberta RCMP

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