Reckoning with the new weather
John Vaillant captures the essence of a new kind of weather in his book “Fire Weather.” It’s the story of the Fort McMurray forest fire in Alberta, Canada that destroyed most of the town in 2016.
Almost 100,000 people had to be evacuated when the unprecedented fire took officials by surprise and engulfed the city. Beginning as a small wildfire five miles outside the city, it started consuming grasses, dead leaves and forest duff.
Perfect conditions existed in that temperatures for early May were some 30 degrees above normal in this sub-arctic environment. Along with the heat was the dryness that it produced. Humidity levels were in the teens and this hot and dry weather allowed the fire to spread rapidly, growing from four acres to 150 in two hours and then to over 2,000 acres in 12 hours.
As the fire spread the third ingredient emerged, wind. The fire was now completely out of control as the winds increased to hurricane force and the fire was able to jump across the Athabasla River, and then proceed through town, consuming and vaporizing everything in its path.
Entire neighborhoods disappeared and 2,500 families lost their homes along with many of the town’s commercial buildings and thousands more were damaged.
The fire destroyed more than 2300 square miles of forest, an area as large as one of our small states.
Wildfires live and die by the weather but the weather today is different, being propelled by the energy from the continuous burning of fossil fuels and Fort McMurray is at the epicenter of Canada’s petroleum industry. The morning of the fire the fuel consisted of 80 years of unburned Boreal Forest along with 50 years of vinyl sided plywood constructed faux housing to support the petro industry workers.
Add this to the extreme heat, low humidity and the winds and the stage is set for a fire disaster. This was also the year the CO2 hit 405 ppm, a 45% increase from the start of the industrial revolution. The last time levels were this high it took millions of years to do so.
Since many forest fires are started by lightning, it is interesting to note that for every degree our planet warms, lightning increases by 12%. In June of 2021 the temperature in Canada reached an all -time high of 121 degrees and a wind driven fire in the Hamlet of Lytton in British Columbia burned the town to the ground in 30 minutes. 21st century fire is formed out of a hotter, drier atmosphere and this has tilted in fires’ favor to begin easier and spread quickly and unforgivingly.
This is not the planet earth as we humans found. This is a new place, a fire planet we have made with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion at any time in the past 3 million years.
Call it the Petrocene Age.