Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future

Introduction

… I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say, what was this forest savage, rough, and stern, which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more …

— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

On May 3, 2016, a rapidly spreading wildfire around Alberta’s oil sands capital in Fort McMurray sent 88,000 people fleeing their homes, offices, hospitals, schools, and seniors’ residences. The people left so quickly that they were gone before the government declared a provincial state of emergency. Thick smoke turned day into night. Embers rained down on cars and trucks as people headed south to the city of Edmonton or north to the safety of oil sands camps and First Nations communities.

By the time rains and cooler temperatures helped firefighters contain MWF-009, as the ninth regional blaze of the season is officially called, 2,800 homes and buildings were destroyed. Nearly 1.4 million acres (566,168 hectares) 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. Firefighters referred to the enormous conflagration as the Horse River fire or The Beast. The second was an apt name, as the fire ended up being the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history and one of the most destructive North American wildfires in modern times. Police and firefighters fully expected to find hundreds if not thousands of bodies in burnt-out cars, trucks, and homes. It was a miracle that, except for two young people who were fatally injured in a car crash on the drive south, no one died.

That so few people perished is exceptional, especially given how much went wrong with the management of the fire and the painfully slow decision making that went into the evacuation process. There was no shortage of heroics. But egos got in the way. A unified command that would have been able to reconcile inherently different approaches by wildland and structural firefighters took too long to come together. A provincial state of emergency, which would have given the government of Alberta clear, concise, and far-reaching authority to deal with the fire, wasn’t called until two days after most everyone was gone. Unhappy with how the fires were being managed, oil sands companies hired their own independent experts to evaluate the magnitude of the risks to their operations.

Megafire, a relatively new word used to describe wildfire, is by one definition a fire that burns at least 100,000 acres (40,468 hectares). These fires routinely occur in Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and throughout the forests of western Canada, northern Ontario, most of Quebec, and the northern United States. On occasion, they burn in the soggier East Coast and Pacific Northwest regions. The Carlton Complex fire burned more than 250,000 acres on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range in Washington in 2015. There is a reason for such fires: coniferous trees that grow in the montane, subalpine, Columbian, and boreal forests are ecologically programmed to burn.

The Horse River fire was not an anomaly as some people have suggested. Fires in Alberta have burned bigger (Chinchaga 1950), hotter (Chisholm 2001), and faster (Vega 1968). The difference between what is happening now and what was happening in the 1980s and earlier is that megafires are occurring more often, displacing more and more people, and reshaping forest and tundra ecosystems in ways that scientists don’t fully understand.

What made the Horse River fire unique is that it created its own lightning storm, which set off many more fires several miles ahead of its path. What made it rare is that it burned in the so-called urban/wildland interface, where millions of people live, work, and recreate in and around the forests. Catastrophic fires like this one are going to happen more often because urban and industrial developments are encroaching on undeveloped wildlands at a record pace. Humans start wildfires, as they did in Fort McMurray and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in 2016, Slave Lake in 2011, Kelowna in 2003, and Hayman in Colorado in 2002. In Canada, a little over half the wildfires are started by humans. In the United States, human-started wildfires account for 84 percent of all wildfires, and nearly half of all area that is burned.¹

When the Horse River fire was finally under control on the fifth day of July, I was in a burned-out area in the boreal forest just north of Fort McMurray, catching nighthawks with Elly Knight, a graduate student from the University of Alberta in Canada. The Common Nighthawk is a small bird that is not a hawk, nor is it strictly nocturnal. Because its population has plummeted in North America, it is also no longer common. Nonetheless, it thrives in postfire landscapes, as Knight had discovered in the weeks before I arrived on the scene.

The nighthawk is a mottled gray, brown, and black bird with white patches, big black eyes, and a mouth that opens almost as wide as its head. More often than not, you hear its sharp, electric peent before you see it snatch its prey—a fire beetle or moth—with a graceful swoop.

It was 11 p.m. on a moonless night as I followed Knight through the dusky forest, systematically checking to see if any nighthawks had flown into her strategically placed nets. Along the horizon of the ebony sky, we could see a faint glimmer of light pulsing from Imperial Oil’s oil sands plant in the Kearl Lake area many miles to the south of us. The $7.3 billion project pumps out 220,000 barrels of bitumen per day.

Stumbling along in the dark, waving off mosquitoes, I came within an inch of being flattened to the ground when a stubborn, fire-scarred branch I tried to break with my foot rebounded an inch short of whacking me in the head. Just as I bent down to retrieve my hat, one, two, and then four nighthawks swooped down in front of us—not just once, but several times—before they disappeared into the night. It was both utterly charming and completely disarming, like a conjuring of birds in a Harry Potter novel. I could see their big black eyes illuminated by the glow of our headlamps, looking at us as if to ask, Who are you? Why are you here?

Figure I-1 Elly Knight holds one of several nighthawks she has been tracking in a burned-out forest north of Fort McMurray and the oil sands. (Edward Struzik)

It was in that intersection that I saw how these two distinct worlds are colluding and colliding. In front of us fluttered a charismatic, threatened bird thriving on fire beetles and other insects that follow fire so that they can feed and lay their eggs on dead trees. (The warmer the tree, the better for some of the insects.) Behind us glowed the lights of fossil fuel–driven human activity that was both displacing the forest habitat these birds thrive in and emitting greenhouse gases that are warming the climate and triggering atmospheric disturbances, driving wildfire to burn bigger, faster, hotter, and more often.

You would think that the nighthawks would benefit from an increasing number of wildfires, just as insects, woodpeckers, Clark’s nuthatches, moose, elk, deer, bears, and other creatures do when scorched trees decay and insects move into a burned area, when wind-blown seeds fall to the ground, and when a new crop of trees, berry bushes, grass, and wild rooted vegetables rise up around them in sequential order. Indeed, they do. With a few notable exceptions such as grosbeaks, goshawks, and endangered spotted owls that thrive almost exclusively in old-growth forest, most of the five billion birds that nest in the northern forests of the continent fare well in postfire conditions as insects and seed-bearing plants begin to recolonize the disturbed landscape.

The wildfire paradigm we are moving into is not what it was when Europeans began settling in North America, however. Nor is it the same as it was before that, when North American indigenous people lit up the forests to promote the growth of berries, to attract wildlife, to clear trails, and to build up firewood supplies.

In this new paradigm, humans, climate, and weather-driven conflagrations are taking center stage in transforming much of the boreal and northern forests on the continent into something that will be quite different by midcentury or even sooner. The bigger, faster-moving wildfires that are likely to occur more often will change the structure of the forests and the vegetation on the tundra, affect the wildlife that live in them, and compromise the quality of water that flows through them and the quality of air people breathe, both immediately downwind of a fire and in places much farther away. Increasingly, industrial activity in these regions will be temporarily shut down, and more towns will have to be evacuated. Like the Fort McMurray fire and the record-breaking fire season of 2015 in the United States and Canada, big wildfires will have a negative effect on national, state, and provincial economies.

The detrimental impacts of wildfire are accelerating at a time when oil sands, hydraulic fracturing (fracking), logging, mining, hydroelectric developments, and ever-expanding townsites are voraciously consuming the northern forests. In the boreal forest, which accounts for most of the trees found in the northern forests and 30 percent of the forested area in the entire world, more than 180 million acres of trees and wetlands have already been consumed by industrial activity. Thirty percent of the boreal forest in Canada is slated for some form of future development. In the United States, there are now more than 46 million single-family homes, several hundred thousand businesses, and 120 million people living and working in and around the country’s forests. The pace of development is most pronounced in the American West, where 70 percent of the wildlands are managed by a patchwork of state and federal agencies for a mix of uses: fish and wildlife, forests, water resources conservation, and, increasingly, residential development.

As more people move into forest environments, wildfire tends to loom as a killer, not as a magnificent spectacle that promotes biodiversity. That further complicates the stakes of fire management.

Darby Allen, the man who led firefighting efforts in Fort McMurray, likened the fire he fought to a wild animal that could not be tamed. It seemed that whatever we did, it just kind’ve laughed at us and did something else. It was a beast, he told reporters during one of his almost-daily briefings.

It is true that there is no stopping these fiery beasts, as many people in Fort McMurray unrealistically expected before the fire made three runs into town while they were at home, work, or school. The energy of these conflagrations is as powerful as the energy of hurricanes and tornadoes. No one tries to stop those from happening.

When pyrocumulonimbus-driven lightning strikes set off several fires 21 miles (34 kilometers) in advance of The Beast, wildfire scientists were astonished. Wildfire fighters recoiled. Unlike most fires, this one didn’t always go to sleep in the coolness of the night.

This is a really dirty fire, Allen said at one point when it seemed to some like the worst was over. There are certainly areas within the city which have not been burned, but this fire will look for them and it will take them.

Wildfire scientist Marty Alexander laments that we have a tendency to forget catastrophic wildfire events even when they cause so much despair, death, and destruction. Although there is a museum dedicated to the legacy of wildfire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which was struck by tragedy in 1871, it is unusual. There are no major museums dedicated to the legacy of wildfire in Canada or the United States. All there is to commemorate the Great Porcupine fire that sent thousands of people to take refuge in lakes and mine shafts in 1910 is a cemetery monument that pays tribute to the estimated two hundred Ontarians who died. I remember being surprised, almost shocked, when the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta, staged a wildfire art exhibit based on the epic fires that burned in the Rocky Mountains and other regions of Canada and the United States in 2003. It was so unusual.

The 2003 fires were wake-up calls because they demonstrated just how vulnerable we are becoming to fire by encouraging so many people to live and work in the northern forests. But it was not the first time that wildfire demonstrated that it can be a master rather than a servant. The Miramachi fire in New Brunswick and Maine burned 2.9 million acres (1.2 million hectares) and killed twelve hundred people in 1825. The Peshtigo fire of 1871 burned eighteen towns and 1.2 million acres of trees and killed twelve hundred people in Wisconsin. The 1910 fires in Idaho, Montana, and Washington were so big and devastating that they changed the course of the US Forest Service’s approach to wildfire. The 1950 Chinchaga fire complex was the biggest fire incident in North American history. It burned 3.5 million acres of forest in northern Alberta and British Columbia before snow fell and snuffed it out.

In the mid- to late twentieth century, we got good at fighting fires with initial attack crews, helicopters, air tankers, chemical retardants, sprinklers, and wildfire managers who, thanks to science, had books and calculators in hand with equations that could tell them how a wildfire would spread in a particular forest and how it would behave in various weather conditions. It’s not that this kind of understanding is bad. Wildfire science has saved tens of thousands of lives and averted ecological and economic disaster in many places. But in suppressing so many fires for so long, we have created a surplus of mature trees in our northern forests, trees that are just waiting to be either burned by wildfire or killed by disease and insect infestations. Letting these trees burn to allow a younger forest to take over is an obvious solution, but doing so is a challenge because we have encouraged so many people to turn wildlands into real estate and private property. Many of us have also convinced ourselves, rightly in some cases, that old-growth forests must be preserved to save wildlife.

When Fort McMurray burned, there was an inclination by many environmentalists to blame it on climate change, but that played into the hands of the deniers and a skeptical media. It is difficult, if not impossible, to attribute one single extreme event to climate change, according Francis Zweirs, a renowned climate change scientist and director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria. Far too many variables—such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the North Pacific Oscillation, and the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic—can derail the rhythm of the weather-controlling jet stream. Zweirs and his colleagues tried connecting the Horse River fire, the Calgary floods of 2013, China’s devastatingly hot summer of 2013, and record low sea-ice cover in the Arctic in 2012 to climate change. The only absolute connection they could make to climate change was record low sea-ice cover in the Arctic.

In drawing the link between wildfire and climate change, what’s important is the framing of the answer to the media question. Including the Horse River fire in a pattern of extreme events that are connected to climate change is a good way of informing decision makers and a public tuned in to news and updates in 20-second sound bites and 140-character messages. Canadian scientist Mike Flannigan might have had the best answer for the media when he was widely quoted as saying, The Horse River Fire is consistent with what we expect from human-induced climate change.

With his almost daily press conferences, Darby Allen may have been the play-by-play host for the Horse River fire, but to get an informed assessment of what was happening and why, the world’s media went to behind-the-scenes analyst Flannigan. At one point, Flannigan was on the phone from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily, doing interviews with the New York Times and Washington Post, Canada’s Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and CBC, and foreign news organizations such as the BBC and Le Figaro.

No one was better qualified to play the role. Flannigan’s fascination with fire started at a very early age when he nearly burned down his grandparent’s town in rural southern Alberta while playing with matches. The last-minute intervention of a relative saved the day. Since then, he’s been redeeming himself with a career that began as a meteorologist, followed by graduate degrees in atmospheric sciences from Colorado State and plant sciences from the University of Cambridge in England. While working as a research scientist for the Canadian Forest Service, he was the International Journal of Wildland Fire’s editor in chief and a task leader for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme. The US government called on him to lead a group working on wildfire for the National Assessment Program on Global Change. Now a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, he counts people in government as former and current students.

The facts tell the story, according to Flannigan. On average, more than seven thousand wildfires burn in Canada each year. The area burned has doubled since the 1970s when global temperatures began to rise in earnest, far faster in northern climes than in temperate regions. As the climate continues to warm, he said, the area burned is likely to double again by the middle of the twenty-first century and possibly triple by the end of it. Another Horse River fire, he suggests, is inevitable in a warmer, drier forest environment with more fuel on the ground and more people living, working, and recreating in that landscape.

Figure I-2 Wildfire made three runs into the city of Fort McMurray before a mass exodus of 88,000 people followed. (Courtesy of RCMP, Fort McMurray)

The future looks just as daunting in the American West, where wildfire is expected to double and possibly triple the area burned in places by 2050. In Montana, temperatures are expected to rise by as much as 5°F (2.7°C). There may be as many as fifteen more summer days in which temperatures exceed 95°F (35°C) by then. It will be a lot drier in summer.

David L. Peterson, a research scientist with the US Forest Service, closely watched the Fort McMurray situation unfold because it came on the heels of a record-breaking fire season in the United States. Like many wildfire scientists, Peterson lives in the forest. He’s viewed fire from both a personal and a professional perspective. He has written more than two hundred peer-reviewed papers and has served on the board of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Keeping up with the scientific information on climate change and wildfire, he says, is like drinking from a fire hose. The volume of scientific literature makes it challenging, if not impossible, to sort through and evaluate evolving concepts and interpretations of how climate, wildfire, insects, drought, flooding, and invasive species are going to change our forests.

Peterson allows that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that fires are more common when it is hot and dry. If the climate modelers are right, wildfire seasons like the one we had in 2015 when 10 million acres of forest burned could become the new normal by midcentury, he said. Increasing temperatures coupled with increased wildfire are going to result in complex ecological and social challenges for federal resource managers. This cannot be resolved by simply pouring more money into fire suppression.

No one knows when and where the next Fort McMurray will occur. Fire experts have their own long lists of candidates. Mike Flannigan has Prince George in British Columbia and Timmins in northern Ontario on his list. Ken Till, former deputy fire director for the Western Region of the US National Park Service, fears that a catastrophic wildfire in and around an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site watershed that flows into Lake Coeur d’Alene in Idaho could result in soil erosion and flooding that liberates toxic materials. Wildfire scientist Cliff White suggests that Sulphur Mountain in Banff could burn, endangering thousands of tourists. Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine are also likely to burn big sooner rather than later. So are the forests of New Jersey, a state not known for making wildfire headlines. A wildfire risk assessment conducted by that state compared the boreal-like Pinelands to an inch of gasoline covering all of south and central New Jersey.² Ten major fires have burned in the Pinelands since the 1950s. The thirty-seven fires that burned in the United States in 1963 are often cited as a benchmark for wildfire/urban interface comparison. Nearly 200,000 acres of forest were torched that year.

The growing cost of fighting wildfires is already overwhelming the ability of governments to manage wildfire and the forests they burn. For the first time in the US Forest Service’s history, more than half the agency’s annual appropriated budget was devoted to wildfires in 2015, up from 16 percent in 1995. Nowadays, the US Forest Service’s annual firefighting budget routinely runs out of money before the fire season ends. With this trend of increasing costs for fighting wildfires expected to continue, two-thirds of the agency’s budget will go for this kind of work by 2025. That will take money away from forest management, maintaining parks and recreation areas for hikers, campers, hunters, and anglers, and habitat restoration for threatened and endangered species.

In Canada, where investment in wildfire science has been mercilessly gutted since the 1980s, wildfire, parks, and forest managers are having an equally difficult time keeping up. In 2016, Parks Canada’s budget was about a third short of what is required to manage fire in the national park forests. In 2003, there were so many fires burning in British Columbia that the provincial firefighting authority went into triage mode, fighting only those fires that were burning where humans were most vulnerable. For the first time, the government of Alberta couldn’t fight all the fires it wanted to fight in 2015, even though it brought in help from Mexico and Australia when some oil sands operations were in danger of burning. Wildfire management costs in Canada topped the $1 billion mark that year. That had never happened before.

Some politicians are beginning to take note. On August 14, 2015, when there were sixty large fires burning in thirteen states and nearly 20,000 people fighting them, Tom Vilsack, US secretary of agriculture at the time, stated bluntly, We are at a tipping point. Congress must change the way it pays for wildfires by providing a fiscally responsible way to treat catastrophic wildfires more like the natural disasters that they are, end fire transfers, partially replenish our capacity to restore resilient forests, and protect lives and property against future fires.³

It is difficult to argue that Vilsack was wrong. But, as David Peterson contends, pouring more money into wildfire suppression is not the answer. The boreal forest, and many of the northern forests that border it, is truly a pyrogenic forest that is designed by nature to invite fires. It is born to burn.

The size of the fires that inevitably come will depend on how high the temperatures are, how dry it is, how fast the wind is blowing, how old and expansive the forest is, and what breaks and barriers there may be on the landscape. These breaks could be a wetland or swamp, a gulch with few trees, or a stand of aspen. In contrast to conifers, aspen stands are less likely to catch fire, and when they do, they tend to burn more slowly. Lakes and rivers like the Athabasca that flows through Fort McMurray are the most common type of fire