Fire!

Coming soon to a locality near you...

Jan 11, 2024

Brought to you by Global Warming induced Climate Change, the new and improved hotter, bigger, faster FIRE!

above: the fire closes in on Fort McMurray

Living in a forest that is very well stocked (and stacked) with fuel through lack of management over the last forty years, and very aware of temperatures climbing inexorably upwards, I am, I think understandably, concerned about wild fire. I've written about this before here on Substack and wanting to increase my understanding of the new nature of fire in a world of global warming, I've just finished reading John Vaillant's excellent book, Fire Weather.1

On the surface, Fire Weather is a thorough account and analysis of the 2016 Fort McMurray fire in Alberta, Canada. Fort McMurray, or Petrol City as it is known by its own residents, grew very rapidly in the last few decades in response to the huge amounts of money being thrown at the enormous quantities of bituminous shale lying just below the surface of Alberta's boreal forest, a forest that includes pine, aspen and black spruce.

Some perspective first. Canada is enormous, larger than India, bigger even than Australia. Alberta is similarly vast, (though only the fourth largest Canadian state), at 661,848 square kilometres (255,541 square miles), making it over three times the size of the Island of Britain, an area of a mere 209,331 km² (80,823 sq mi), yet with a population less than a twelfth of the UK's at under five million.

Vaillant, speaking about the evolution of wild fire in the state, begins with the Chisholm Oak fire of 2001, at the time the largest fire recorded. This fire was so large it generated its own weather system, (lightning, rain, storm force winds) pushed a pyrocumulonimbus cloud up into the stratosphere and was picked up by the US security agency who thought Canada had tested an atomic bomb.

This fire gives a good idea of the size of Alberta as no one in Alberta (or indeed Canada) knew anything about it until the Americans got in touch. The Albertans sent some research scientists to look for it...The energy released by this fire was estimated to be about equivalent to a 17 megaton nuclear explosion, that is, much bigger than the atomic bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were roughly 12-15 and 17 kilotons respectively, (mega is a thousand times larger than kilo).

A fire front, that is the part of the fire which is moving the fastest, usually in response to topography or wind, emits energy as radiant heat measured in kilowatts. So a slow moving grass fire might emit one kilowatt per metre of front and can be tackled by people wielding beaters. Once you get above 2 kilowatts per metre of front, you really need water and as the radiant heat increases as a consequence of more fuel for the fire to burn, then you need mechanical assistance. The heat of the Chisholm fire front was estimated at over 200,000 kilowatts per metre of front...

In describing the disaster of the Fort McMurray fire of May 2016, which is truly terrifying, Vaillant includes detailed accounts of past fires in Alberta (such as the Chisholm fire of 2001, above) and elsewhere as background. He also provides an excellent potted histories of the Alberta Tar Sands and the development of the huge industry that has arisen to extract them. He looks in detail at “The Site”, as the vast extraction area is described (the only human created feature visible from space- have a look at the maps on a world famous search engine's web site. Contrary to popular believe the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space as it is too thin).

above: just a very small fraction of “The Site”. Try looking on a world famous search engine’s map and zooming in…

I've previously read about “The Site” in another book, Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life; A Tar Sands Tale by Matt Hern and Am Jahal with Joe Sacco2 that paints a similar vivid picture in an open, non-judgemental way which allows the reader to appreciate why individuals might choose to work at “The Site”- basically money, lots of money. It also deals very well with the environmental and social consequences of the extraction and subsequent pollution, in particular the effect on the indigenous peoples whose land is being despoiled.

And lets not make any bones about this, “The Site” in Alberta is an appalling assault on the earth and its people at the very bottom of the Brown Tech future that David Holmgren envisages in his Future Scenarios- you can't really get much dirtier energy than this. The “finished” product is DilBit, basically “cleaned” bitumen mixed with diesel oil to get it thin enough to burn. Its a disgustingly dirty industry that contaminates land and water to such an extent that it is not known if a genuine clean up (which was touted as part of the whole extraction process) is even possible.

The scale of the extraction process is difficult to comprehend- how many times can you use the words vast, huge, enormous? The machines at the opencast working face are some of the biggest ever built, imagine a Ferris wheel 10 stories high but carrying scoops you could fit a house in, these nightmare beasts work 24/7, every day of the year and until the Fort McMurray fire, had never stopped since they were first put there. The dumper trucks that service these monsters weigh up to 400 tons unladen...

above: machines on “The Site”. Don’t be fooled by the scale. Note the bulldozer low on the left, a D8, is huge. The tyres on those dumper trucks are fifteen feet in diameter…

“The Site” contains many hundreds of different companies, all scrambling for a share of the loot, a substance that is so polluting and so difficult to extract, separate, clean and otherwise process that only a very high oil price plus huge subsidies and tax incentives from the Canadian State and Federal governments, makes it even remotely financially viable. The Site's fortunes has waxed and waned as the price of oil moved up and down and it may be that the Fort McMurray fire marked the beginning of the end for the Alberta tar sands.

Vaillant also includes an account of the science of global warming which most of us will already know but what is so surprising here is how early some of this thinking appeared- would you believe 1824? Also vital here is the presentation of the oil companies own studies of CO2 emissions in the 1970s which showed conclusively that continued use of fossil fuels would wreck the climate and make the Earth uninhabitable. That these companies chose to not only ignore their own studies but actually suppress and deny it in the next decades leads nicely into a chapter on litigation.

This is a positive and genuinely hopeful section which suggests how the oil industry might be tamed, might even be being tamed, namely by the fear of litigation for past misdemeanours. Oil companies are currently facing many thousands of lawsuits in different countries for knowingly causing harm to young people of today and the future. The cases are brought by both large collectives and individuals (a 17 year old Australian school pupil, for example, took their environment minister to court for failing to protect her and other young people's futures). Although some of these cases fail, the fear of litigation and possible vast fines was one pressure in Alberta that has caused a huge reduction of investment.

Back to the fire itself, which is central to the narrative. Wildfires are described in certain ways but as the size and intensity of a fire increase, the term “Out Of Control” is displaced by “Beyond Resources”. People will still attempt to fight a fire that is out of control but when it is beyond resources, the only thing to do is to get out of the way and pray for rain. The Fort McMurray fire kicked off on May 1^st 2016 and was finally declared extinguished on August 2^nd 2017, having finished its assault on Petrol City, wandered off into British Columbia for a while then head back into Alberta and set off towards the great lakes, consuming over 1.5 million acres of forest and with an estimated cost of 9.9 billion Canadian dollars (about 5.8 billion pounds).

above: gridlocked on the road south, looking through and into hell..

In the event, Fort McMurray's 90,000 inhabitants were all evacuated. With only two roads out to North and South, the route south became gridlocked immediately and people spent up to three terrified hours in their cars with fires raging on both sides. Once into the town the fire capriciously changed direction multiple times, first leaving some properties untouched then returning to consume them. In all “only” some 2.500 homes were destroyed as the fire changed its mind and headed north, away from the town. Remarkably there was no loss of live, almost unbelievable given the awesome energy the fire unleashed.

One consequence of fires, whether starting in the home or from outside, is that the heat causes any petroleum products to give off flammable gases. Petrol City lived up to its name- carpets, curtains, wall coverings, work surfaces, furniture, cushions, bedding, window frames, cladding on the exterior walls and tar impregnated cedar shingles are all based on petroleum products. The radiant heat from the approaching fire front was so great that by the time the flames reached a house it was already filled with and surrounded by highly volatile gases, meaning that the entire house would burst into flames3.

In the conditions at Fort McMurray in early May 2016, once the fire hit the town,the houses burned to ashes in just five minutes. So precise was this that the unbelievably brave fire fighters who were still trying to control it were able to time how long till the fire front reached them by counting the houses between them and it. The fire left nothing behind it- the cinder blocks the houses were built from, the roof timbers and anything other than substantial chunks of metal such as cast iron baths, were vaporised. When people finally returned, hoping to salvage at least something, they found only piles of ashes in the their basements.

The underlying message here is that in the era of rapid Global Warming, fires have become a different beast all together. Increasing aridity in many parts of the world means potential fuels are tinder dry earlier in the year than ever. Fires burn faster, consume more fuel and burn hotter. The concept of a fire season has vanished with devastating fires occurring at any time of the year. More recent events in California and of course Australia, have seen even larger and more destructive fires than that at Fort McMurray.

above: dropping water and fire retardant from planes or, as here, helicopter becomes more and more dangerous as the fire grows. If the water is dumped from too high up, it simply evaporates before it reaches the flames, hence very low flying is required, often through dense smoke, inevitably leading to fatal accidents.

At Fort McMurray, once the fire got into the town, the traditional approach of defending individual houses became meaningless. Firefighters adopted the broad-scale tactics of forest fires, borrowing some of the massive equipment from “The Site” to flatten and bulldoze entire rows and blocks of houses and create firebreaks but in the end it was only a change in wind direction that saved the bulk of the town.

Here in the UK we've seen wildfires where we never expected them and some have made their way into built up areas. Even here in once Wet Wales we've had forest fires only half a mile from our house. In this instance, only a contrary wind stopped the fire from spreading to more fuel rich (for which read unmanaged) forest).

This fire was started accidentally (sparks from an angle grinder being used to cut a metal gatepost) on a clear felled site. I remember talking to old foresters about the fire risk on clear fell sites back in the 1980s; these sites are liberally strewn with “waste” timber, up to 10% of the harvested crop but the foresters reassured me that they didn’t burn, any fires that started there tended to burn themselves out. Not so now. Increasingly hot and arid conditions in the spring and summer mean that fuels can be tinder dry. Once you reach that critical threshold of 30-30-30 (30 degrees centigrade or more, 30% humidity or less and a windspeed of 30mph or more) the slightest spark can ignite an inferno, very rapidly.

So I have been preparing for the last decade or so4, taking much more care about what I leave lying about, chipping brash from tree work rather than leaving piles as “habitat”, increasing our water storage and hose points, having beaters to hand and am considering investing in something that the Canadians have long used, namely a water pump with a set of attached sprinklers- in the event of a major fire these can be located as necessary to dampen down vegetation or, in our case, wet that cedar cladding.

However, its important to recognise that some fires will be so big, hot and fast that they cannot be controlled. My friend and colleague Misrule who lives in France, has a bag packed ready for when the next wildfire gets close. It won't be long before many of us will have to be similarly prepared.

Thanks for reading. Any suggestions for fire control gratefully received!

I must admit to a strong association to Alberta, Canada, having had the great and unusual good fortune to spend over a month there, in Jasper, a tiny town just inside the Rocky Mountains but already higher (just over 3,000 feet) than anything we’d been up in Cumberland, way back in 1969 when I was a mere 11 years old, a fantastic formative experience that has influenced my thinking on landscapes and forest ever since. Now, Jasper is just outside the Albertan tar sands operation.

above: me at 11 years old on Mount Athabasca, Canada, about 6,000 feet up- very unlike Cumberland. Grabbed from a cine film- Our entire visual record of this mammoth, once in a lifetime trip was four cine films, each four minutes long. I know, dark ages…

When I was in Canada, we travelled on the Pan Canadian Railroad from Winnipeg (pretty much bang in the middle of Canada) to Jasper, a train journey of two days and one night, most of the second day through Albertan virgin forest. The state authorities had cut surveying lines through the forest, splitting it up into 1000 acre blocks which could be bought at the subsidised price of 20,000 Canadian dollars (at the time, about £5,000). Some younger friends of my father’s were buying a block. They described how you could get a mobile sawmill company to come in, clear and mill 100 acres to create your fields and all the timber for your house, barns, fencing etc. leaving you 900 acres of pristine forest. My brother and I were unable to persuade our father….now, given the awful combination of devastating wild fire and the industrial tar sands venture, that was probably just as well.

E.S.P. Adapt

Discussion about this post