Fire Weather is a remarkable nonfiction book by award-winning author John Vaillant—part frightening description, part homage to those who fight wildfires, and part expression of frustration at lost opportunities. He centers the book around a wildfire that started near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, in May 2016. The town is populated by people who work in the oil extraction industry, which is a hellish kind of existence itself. He takes time to describe this environment, so that when the fire arrives, you understand what’s at stake. He calls Fire Weather “a true story from a hotter world.”
The middle section of the book details the battle against the wildfire relentlessly approaching Fort McMurray. Abetted by long-term drought, the fire has plenty of fuel. High temperatures prevent night-time cooling, which would aid the firefighters. The fire develops enough energy to start creating its own weather, propelled forward via hurricane-force winds . Vaillant’s descriptions of fire tornadoes is especially vivid. Using the one road out of town, families must evacuate through fire and smoke, and ordering evacuation is almost unthinkable. But, contrary to expectation and sooner than authorities believe, it has to be done.
Vaillant points out the vast qualitative differences between a structural fire, which we are accustomed to reading about (“Firefighters had the building fire under control in two hours” kind of thing) and a wildfire. Emphasis is on the wild. As people build their houses farther and farther into wooded suburban areas, wildfires engulf them easily. Firefighters on the front lines in Fort McMurray watched the fire move up a residential street, destroying one home after another. From the time the fire first reached a house until it was reduced to nothing but a pile of ash took three minutes. Three minutes in which the house was gone, aluminum framing melted, window glass reduced to puddles, and no plumbing fixtures. They were simply vaporized.
As I write this, the largest wildfire in Texas history rages in the Panhandle and into Oklahoma. Memories are fresh of the smoke from last year’s Canadian wildfires that traveled thousands of miles and created lingering eerie light in the middle and eastern United States. The conditions that enable the spread of these devastating fires continue. We have created the conditions for, as Vaillant puts it, “fire weather.”
The third part of the book details the failed politics of regulating the industries that contribute to the danger. It is, as you would expect, frustrating reading.
You’ll never be able to read about a wildfire in Europe, in Australia, in Chile—anywhere—in the same way. By the way, the Fort McMurray wildfire was not declared extinguished until August 2017—15 months after it began.
Photos: Fort McMurray evacuation by DarrenRD, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license; NYC blanketed in smoke by Anthony Quintano, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.