Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

Wayne McGrath, a welder with Suncor, was unwilling to abandon almost a million dollars’ worth of tools and vehicles in his garage. He fought the fire with his garden hose for as long as he could, but firefighters forced him to leave before the fire consumed him. He had to abandon his beloved Harley Davidson motorcycle, and as he drove away and saw his roof catch fire, he began to cry.

People’s home security systems captured video of the fire blowing out windows and consuming vinyl siding and smoke filling the rooms before the cameras melted. Homes that were bought at inflated prices became ashes in minutes.

In the midst of the fire, the firefighters experienced a horrifying situation: The fire hydrants ran dry, partly because heat from the fire damaged the pipes, causing leaks. Without water, the firefighters “were like soldiers deprived of ammunition” (168). They struggled not only to evacuate civilians but also to keep track of one another. Despite the incredible danger, no civilians or first responders lost their lives during the fire.

The videos taken by evacuees on May 3 depict “screaming, swearing, praying, begging, and crying” as they witnessed fire on all sides, like a blinding tunnel (171). The May 3 exodus from Fort McMurray represents the largest, fastest fire-related displacement in North American history. The fire took on almost biblical proportions: A gigantic plume overshadowed the entire city, and a smoke column of superheated air rose rapidly into the atmosphere, creating a vacuum that sucked cooler air toward the fire at frightening speeds.

In addition, the fire created a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or “pyroCb,” a massive thundercloud 200 miles wide and tall enough to reach into the stratosphere. A relatively rare phenomenon, the pyroCb most often occurs over volcanic eruptions but famously happened during the Chisholm fire, which covered about 50,000 square miles. Because of climate change, pyroCbs have become increasingly common in the last 20 years. PyroCbs can create pyrogenic lightning, and in the Fort McMurray fire, pyrogenic lightning combined with embers, wind, and heat to turn the fire into “a perpetual motion machine of destruction” (174).

Town officials’ initial failure to understand the fire’s danger is “as old as human judgment” (179). Risk analysts and philosophers alike refer to this as the “Lucretius problem,” after a Roman scholar and poet. It refers to humans’ inability to imagine things they have not yet seen. Humans have difficulty conceiving of events outside their own personal experience and thus are often ill-equipped to handle massive deviation. Scrambling to develop plans and infrastructure for the evacuation response, city officials (including Allen and Schmitte) told people to evacuate both north and south in order to mitigate traffic and set up emergency shelters. Despite his heroic efforts, when Allen was interviewed on the evening of May 3, however, he “wrangled the sobs in his throat” as he tried to speak (183). Describing the community as “devastated,” he confirmed that Fort McMurray had been overrun by wildfire.

At 10 o’clock at night on May 3, Allen and Schmitte went back on air. Compared to their morning broadcast, they appeared to have emerged from a war zone. They admitted that the fire was out of control and that firefighters could no longer hope to mitigate it. However, as far as anyone could tell, miraculously, no one had died or even been seriously injured. When a journalist asked via text whether the worst was over, Schmitte admitted that it was not. The weather forecast for the next few days predicted “even more extreme conditions” (185), which would likely keep the fire alive, if not worsen it. Meanwhile, Fort McMurray was a ghost town. Fire trucks no longer bothered sounding sirens on the empty streets, and the firefighters dubbed the scorched city “Zombie Land.” The text compares Fort McMurray to the abandoned city of Pripyat outside the Chernobyl nuclear plant, evacuated so suddenly that the citizens seemed to simply disappear.

Thousands of evacuees moved into the camps where the oil companies housed workers. Other evacuees traveled south, and other towns opened emergency shelters in gyms, stadiums, hotels, and campsites to house them. Staff at these locations were not trained to handle grieving, traumatized families, but survivors later mentioned the compassion of strangers who brought them necessities like food and water, toothbrushes, clean clothes, and diapers. Across the country, donations poured in to help the city and its survivors.

On May 4, reporters estimated that 1,600 buildings in Fort McMurray had been affected by the fire, multiple times the losses of any other fire in Canada. Allen gave another speech, confirming that they had successfully evacuated 88,000 people and that no deaths or major injuries had occurred. However, the forecast was still “disastrous,” predicting strong winds and lightning for the next day and night. In this press conference, Allen described the fire almost as a living being, warning that unburned areas in the town were not yet safe from the fire: “This fire will look for them, and it will find them, and it will want to take them” (195).

At this point, the extraordinary nature of the fire was evident. Whereas some of the most destructive city fires in history were under control in less than two days, the Fort McMurray fire burned constantly for several days, leaving firefighters exhausted. The fire was described as a “siege event,” attacking in all directions. Fires are ultimately mitigated by cooling of the atmosphere, but climate change keeps the atmosphere from performing this vital function. Firefighters had to work without rest to keep the fire from spreading more than it already had. When possible, planes made “retardant drops,” but such drops are impossible to make without visibility, so their ability to help was limited. Because they had limited air support and few chances to rest and refuel, firefighters raided grocery stores for food. Despite the necessity of stealing, many of the firefighters left IOUs behind for the owners.

Vyto Babrauskas, a physicist who studies modern house fire behavior, compared the Fort McMurray fire to the Hamburg firestorm, a World War II carpet bombing by the Allies. This operation painstakingly recreated German housing to figure out the best ways to destroy it. They realized that bombing was less effective than setting fires, so they dropped incendiaries full of fuel, transforming Hamburg’s streets into “canyons of fire” and killing more than 20,000 civilians on the first night (206). This event was later called the Hiroshima of Germany. Babrauskas noted that the firestorm, while human made and deliberate, would not have been nearly as effective without the summer drought conditions and the funneling effects of narrow streets. Hamburg and Fort McMurray had the potential to support huge fires, but not without a massive initial push. Fort McMurray’s version of Allied incendiaries were the black spruce trees surrounding the town. These trees have “exceptionally flammable sap” (208), cones and needles full of resin, and wood dripping with pitch, so they are almost ideal incendiaries.

The firefighters in Fort McMurray reassessed their strategies. They realized that the house fires that day required a different approach than regular house fires. Slave Lake’s firefighters proposed using backhoes and bulldozers to cut firebreaks, not around the city (as in traditional firefighting) but “directly through the neighborhood itself” (214). The emotional toll of destroying homes to stop the fire was heavy, but the strategy worked. Firefighters repurposed machinery from the oil plants to tear up neighborhoods into firebreaks. Eventually, by removing the fire’s source of fuel, they broke the “chain of ignition” and kept the fire out of a block of the Prospect neighborhood (220). Nevertheless, the damage was extensive. The text compares the fire to “a wild beast” (223), drawing parallels to mythical monsters like Beowulf’s Grendel, Moby Dick, and Godzilla but noting the unrelenting brutality that defines monsters: One attack does not make a monster.