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Overview
"Comprehensive and compelling." —Booklist
"A powerful message." —Kirkus
"Should be required reading." —Library Journal
For two months in the spring of 2016, the world watched as wildfire ravaged the Canadian town of Fort McMurray. Firefighters named the fire “the Beast.” It acted like a mythical animal, alive with destructive energy, and they hoped never to see anything like it again. Yet it’s not a stretch to imagine we will all soon live in a world in which fires like the Beast are commonplace. A glance at international headlines shows a remarkable increase in higher temperatures, stronger winds, and drier lands– a trifecta for igniting wildfires like we’ve rarely seen before.
This change is particularly noticeable in the northern forests of the United States and Canada. These forests require fire to maintain healthy ecosystems, but as the human population grows, and as changes in climate, animal and insect species, and disease cause further destabilization, wildfires have turned into a potentially uncontrollable threat to human lives and livelihoods.
Our understanding of the role fire plays in healthy forests has come a long way in the past century. Despite this, we are not prepared to deal with an escalation of fire during periods of intense drought and shorter winters, earlier springs, potentially more lightning strikes and hotter summers. There is too much fuel on the ground, too many people and assets to protect, and no plan in place to deal with these challenges.
In Firestorm, journalist Edward Struzik visits scorched earth from Alaska to Maine, and introduces the scientists, firefighters, and resource managers making the case for a radically different approach to managing wildfire in the 21st century. Wildfires can no longer be treated as avoidable events because the risk and dangers are becoming too great and costly. Struzik weaves a heart-pumping narrative of science, economics, politics, and human determination and points to the ways that we, and the wilder inhabitants of the forests around our cities and towns, might yet flourish in an age of growing megafires.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610918190 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 10/05/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Beast Awakens
A mighty flame follows a tiny spark.
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
On Sunday May 1, 2016, helicopter pilot Heather Pelley was on standby with a small firefighting crew at the Grayling Creek Fire Base, 22 miles (35 kilometers) south of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta. Shortly after 4 p.m. that day, Pelley was playing her guitar on the patio deck when the "dispatch alert" came in with notice that smoke was detected in the region. Once a call like that comes over the radio, or satellite phone, the pilot is expected to be in the air with a four-person helitack crew in 10 minutes.
Pelley had seen it coming weeks earlier when the Alberta government had deployed pilots and contract firefighting personnel across the province a week earlier than usual. The relatively mild winter had produced almost no snow. Spring followed with temperatures that were almost twice the average. With dry grass, brittle shrubs, and a never-ending forest of spruce, pine, poplar, and aspen trees thirsty for rain, everyone expected it to be an early fire season.
It was. Even before May arrived, 281 wildfires had burned in the province. Many more were burning to the west in British Columbia and to the east in Saskatchewan.
As hot, dry, and extremely windy as it was that day, Pelley still expected this call to end up being the "one-tree wonder" that initial attack crews often deal with when lightning, an abandoned campfire, broken power line, an arsonist, or the scorching hot exhaust pipes of an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) ignites a fire in the forest. But when the helicopter cleared the trees that surround the base at the Grayling Creek station that day, she realized how wrong she had been to think that.
"I thought 'holy shit.' How long has this fire been burning? It was more than 50 kilometers away and we could see this big plume of white smoke in the distance. There was no need for the dispatcher to give us the coordinates, as they usually do for an initial attack, so we pointed the nose towards it and off we went," she said.
The Bell 407 that Pelley flies is one of the fastest, most maneuverable helicopters on the planet, easily capable of reaching speeds of 130 knots (150 miles per hour). In the short time it took Pelley and the helitack crew to get to the fire with hoses, hand tools, backpack pumps, and a bucket capable of scooping up to 180 gallons of water, the fire was candling, bending with the wind, billowing black smoke over a high-power transmission line, and pushing west and southwest with winds that were gusting up to 21 miles (33.7 kilometers) per hour. The Abasand and Beacon Hill residential neighborhoods on the south side of Fort McMurray were less than 5 miles (7 kilometers) away.
It was Pelley's third year fighting fires. She had been involved in sixty fires the year before. Both she and veteran helicopter pilot Dave Mulock, whose helitack crew discovered the fire and who was still on the scene, knew right away that there was nothing they could do to stop this one. It was too big and growing too fast. A call had already been made to bring in an air tanker, which was based 155 miles (250 kilometers) to the south at the airport outside of the town of Lac La Biche.
Rather than putting anyone near harm's way, the pilots dropped the helitack crews on the blackened ground at the tail end of the fire close to where tall grass was burning beneath the transmission line. "One foot in the black, one foot in the green" is a lesson that every firefighter learns during training. The black is where firefighters can retreat to if the fire becomes too dangerous to engage. The black (or "good black" as it is sometimes called) is considered a safe haven because the area can generally only burn once.
Pelley and Mulock tried dropping buckets of water they scooped from nearby Horse River to reinforce protection of the helitack crews on the ground, but it was futile. They had to hover high above the smoke and the power lines, struggling against gusty winds. "Before any of the water got anywhere near the ground, it evaporated," Pelley said. "I thought to myself: 'This is useless. Nothing is going to stop this one.'"
The Electra air tanker that was on its way from Lac La Biche carries 1,750 gallons of chemical fire retardant that can slow the momentum of a fire. Traditionally, it is guided in by a lead aircraft, or bird dog, like a Turbo Commander 690. The bird dog flies twice as fast as Pelley's helicopter. There were two people on board this flight: a specially trained pilot and a government-employed air attack officer who decides when and where the retardant is to be dropped. Once a bird dog arrives at a fire, the air attack officer takes charge of everything, including the helicopter pilots. It was not as simple as that. Complicating the situation was another wildfire that had ignited almost simultaneously in the TaigaNova industrial district of Fort McMurray.
"The bird dog that came in to deal with this fire was super calm," recalled Pelly. "But you could tell by the urgency in his voice over the radio that he was really concerned. Right away, he informed the radio room that this was a priority fire."
By the time Pelley arrived, smoke was curling over the people on the ground who were throwing buckets of water on the flames. Fort McMurray firefighters were there as well, doing all they could to contain it.
One of the things Pelley remembers most about that day is how quiet everyone was in the chopper when they were flying back from Horse River. She recalled, "Usually at the end of the day, the helitack crew is pumped and talking about what happened on the ground. But all I saw and heard was the four of them looking back at the fire in silence. It was spooky."
Before packing it in at the base camp for the night, Pelley texted all her friends and her boyfriend with the same message: "Pack and get ready to leave. This fire is coming to town." She — and pretty much everyone who was on the front lines of the fire on that Sunday — was convinced that an evacuation of Fort McMurray was imminent. So were a lot of other people who were monitoring weather reports and satellite data. If strong winds pushed the fire toward Fort McMurray, they knew it could easily override the town in two days or even less.
A small number of people, in fact, were told to leave their homes after a local state of emergency was declared around 10:00 p.m. that Sunday. More were told to go at 3:30 a.m. on Monday. The orders to evacuate most of the 88,000 people who live or work in the unofficial capital of the oil sands industry, however, didn't begin in earnest until Tuesday afternoon, when the fires made three runs into town. Children were still in school. Some parents weren't able to pick them up because the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) had blocked the roads into some neighborhoods to allow residents and school buses to get out and fire trucks and paramedic vehicles to get in. Many of the sick, the pregnant, and the elderly were still in the hospital and in nursing homes. Some residents refused to leave, even after the RCMP and firefighters knocked on their doors and told them they had to go or risk death if they decided to stay.
By then, it was almost too late. With smoke, flames, and embers raining down on houses, schools, churches, stores, city trees, and wooden fences, the cars and trucks that headed out on the only highway of escape were literally bumper to bumper on all four lanes going in and out of town. To expedite the evacuation, the RCMP, along with peace officers and local sheriffs, redirected thousands of cars to the oil camps north of town. Some of the more panicked drivers ended up in ditches. Mercifully, they and other drivers who ran out of gas were able to hitch rides in cars, trucks, and buses that were passing by. RCMP officers in patrol cars made sure that no one was left stranded on the side of the road.
Lorna Dicks, the acting commander of the RCMP detachment, had nearly all 136 of her officers on the streets, directing traffic, knocking on doors, and helping local sheriffs and public health officials evacuate the hospital as the firefighters poured water over it. She was so sure that the entire town was going to be leveled that night that she and her team considered where they might set up a makeshift morgue. She is not alone in suggesting that it was a miracle that only two lives were lost as a direct result of the evacuation. Fort McMurray fire chief Darby Allen told the media that when the sun rose on the day after Tuesday's evacuation, he thought he was being optimistic in thinking that maybe only a few thousand people had died.
By the time the fire was finally brought under control, more than 2,500 homes were destroyed. Twelve thousand cars and trucks were badly damaged. Nearly 1.5 million acres, an area twice the size of Rhode Island, burned. It was the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history. Insurance claims were expected to reach the $3.77 billion mark, twice the cost of the 1998 ice storms that brought down trees and power lines along a narrow swath from eastern Ontario and southern Quebec to Nova Scotia. One study pegged the total economic cost to be $6 billion; another estimated it to be as high as $8.86 billion. Neither study factored in the prospect that the local economy was not likely to recover for a long time to come, even once the rebuild of the city was completed. Thousands of people decided not to go back to Fort McMurray because they had no jobs or homes to return to. Those who stayed had to acknowledge that the sky-high prices they had paid for their homes wouldn't be recouped if they decided to sell.
Fort McMurray may have been the costliest wildfire in North American history, but it was not a one-off event. Since the turn of the twenty-first century (and one might argue that it started well before that), wildfires have been burning bigger, hotter, faster, and more often in places where people live, work, and recreate. By most accounts, Fort McMurray was at medium risk for a catastrophic event such as the one that occurred in 2016. The prospect for more fires in the future was underscored in the months that followed when the Great Smoky Mountains burned around Gatlinburg in Tennessee. Like Fort McMurray, no one saw that one coming, other than climatologists and wildfire experts who had been literally screaming about the potential for more fire in more populated places for years. Fort McMurray was in many ways a bellwether of what to expect in the future as the climate warms and dries out the northern forests and as more people live, work, and recreate in them.
*
On Tuesday, May 3, the day the wildfire entered the residential neighborhood of Beacon Hill at the south end of Fort McMurray, Lucas Welsh was at the Suncor oil sands plant, an hour's drive north of town. He and a group of industrial firefighters who work for the oil sands giant were sitting around the lunch table when they were abruptly dispatched to Beacon Hill to help fight fires that were burning in and around the area.
Before the fire crew left, Welsh called his wife, Adrien, at home to let her know what was happening and to pack a bag just in case.
"I told her not to worry because I was pretty sure that everything would be okay," he said. "But once I saw this Armageddon-like cloud hanging over the city as we crested the hill that goes into town, I knew this wasn't the case. It was like the beginning of the end of the world. Still, I thought that my wife and two sons would be okay because Dickinsfield, the neighborhood we live in, is on the north side of the Athabasca River. The fire we were dispatched to was burning on the south side. It's a big river. There was a lot of space between the fire and our home."
Before the Suncor fire crew got to Beacon Hill, Fort McMurray firefighters were already on the scene and engaged in what was quickly turning out to be a losing battle. A radio call came in telling Welsh and his colleagues to abandon the plan because it was too late to save those homes. Welsh recalled the sinking feeling he had when he passed a row of burning houses in Abasand Heights, the neighborhood north of Beacon Hill. "Firefighters are meant to fight fires, not drive by them," he said. "This was not right."
When the four-person crew was told instead to go to Dickinsfield, the neighborhood Lucas grew up in and now lived, he phoned his wife to let her know what was happening.
*
Adrien Welsh came to Fort McMurray via Arkansas when she was sixteen years old. She hated it from the get-go until she met Lucas at the church her family had joined. That was the beginning of a long hello. Lucas was in every one of her high school classes, and they hit it off quickly. When Adrien's family went back to Arkansas, she moved into his parent's house after Lucas set himself up in apartment with a friend. They married soon after, involving themselves in church affairs and outreach programs. Lucas became a part-time pastor. Adrien became the director of communications. Life was good in the city she once hated.
Adrien knew on Sunday night that there was a fire near Fort McMurray. It was on Facebook, which along with Twitter became the main source of both news and rumors over the next two days. First, it was the horse owners who were boarding their animals at the Clearwater Horse Club south of town. They were told that they would have to come and relocate them. Then a local state of emergency was called, and people in the residential neighborhood of Gregoire and Centennial Park, a mobile home park, on the south end of town were told to leave.
When the city became shrouded in smoke the next day after a clear, sunny start, Adrien still wasn't fazed by what was happening.
"In Central Arkansas we have tornadoes," she said. "In northern Alberta we have wildfire and lots of smoke. You get used to it."
That calm, however, turned to genuine concern on Tuesday morning when thick smoke once again turned a clear day into night for a brief time.
"I took a picture and sent it to Lucas," she said. "He told me to start spraying the roof with water. I didn't realize he was joking until he started laughing."
Adrien doesn't get rattled. Lucas says she's one of the toughest people he knows. But what followed on that Tuesday afternoon shook her to the core. She was at home with Kamille, a four-year old Congolese boy she and Lucas had recently adopted. Justice, her six-year-old, was at school. After seeing pictures of the fire on Facebook and the television news, Lucas's sister called from out of town, urging Adrien to leave.
Adrien wasn't going anywhere.
"Kamille had gone through a lot before we finally brought him to Fort McMurray in March," she explained. "The adoption procedure had not gone well. His English was not good. He was having a tough time adjusting. I didn't want to worry him all over again by moving away. Home, I thought, is forever. And this is where he needed to be."
Adrien still didn't appreciate the perilous nature of the situation until the school called, telling her to pick up Justice. On the way there, she saw people gassing up cars packed full with personal belongings.
"'These people are crazy,' I thought. I was convinced this was not going to be a big deal. I didn't know that some parts of town were under an evacuation alert."
At the school, teachers were openly talking about the city burning down. Adrien still didn't think it was as big a deal as that, but decided to go home and start packing just in case.
"As soon as I started to put things into bins, Kamille had a meltdown and started to cry. I didn't know what to do except to put my mom on the computer so she could talk to him and calm him while I packed. I then called Lucas just as he was trying to call me and told him that it looks like we will have to evacuate. 'Yes, you should — right now,' he told me."
Adrien assumed they would only be gone for a day, but decided to pack for three days just in case. Along with clothes and toys, she brought plenty of food and snacks, including peanut butter and packages of Kraft cheese dinner, the kids' comfort food. In the car, she looked around and figured that things didn't look so bad. Once again, she wondered whether she might be overreacting.
"I called our friend Matt Miniely, who is a pastor at our church. He told me not to even consider staying. He insisted that we meet him at his sister-in-law's place in Timberlea, which is close by, so that we could all leave town together."
Just as she was about to pull out of the driveway, a neighbor advised Adrien to go right instead of left on the street because she was likely to run into a firefighting crew blocking the way. Had she not done what he had recommended, she and the kids would have seen Lucas and his crew trying to save homes that were burning in their neighborhood.
"I think we would have all had a meltdown if that had happened," she said.
Justice, however, did break down as they started to drive down the street. "I thought that with the fire, and leaving home like this had got to him. But when I asked what was wrong, he told me he was crying because he realized that he was going to miss the soccer practice that night," Adrien said.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Firestorm"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Edward Struzik.
Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
DedicationIntroduction
Chapter 1: The Beast Awakens
Chapter 2: Inside the Mind of a Wildfire
Chapter 3: A Legacy of Fire Suppression
Chapter 4: Visions of the Pyrocene
Chapter 5: Water on Fire
Chapter 6: The Big Smoke
Chapter 7; Drought, Disease, Insects, Wildfire
Chapter 8: Fire on Ice
Chapter 9: Agent of Change
Chapter 10: Resilience and Recovery
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Index
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