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Bigger, Hotter, Faster: Canada’s Wildfires are Changing and We’re Not Ready
18
July, 2017
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://www.desmog.ca/2017/07/17/bigger-hotter-faster-canada-s-wildfires-are-changing-and-we-re-not-ready …
#bcpoli #bcwildfire #climate @kujjua
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.
