Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

Once the crews were on scene, it was difficult for them to see the houses, or even each other, and it was impossible to hear anything over the growing roar of the fire, which witnesses compared variously to a jet engine and a freight train. The unremitting din was further intensified by the constant snap and crack of sundering timber—trees and houses alike—and by the sporadic explosions of electrical transformers and fuel tanks. The heat between those burning houses, now comparable to the planet Venus, was unbearable, and so was the smoke. It quickly became clear that, not only was there no way to fight this fire, there was no time. There was time only to get the residents out before they were overrun. This spontaneous transition from firefighting operation to lifesaving operation has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century urban fire—from Portugal and Greece to Australia and California. Some residents had fled already, but who, exactly? In order to find out, firefighters were going door to door. The RCMP were on hand—both to manage traffic and to aid in the searches. The risk of becoming trapped, of being surrounded by the fire on this thickly wooded hilltop, was real and growing more likely by the minute. Steve Sackett, a firefighter in the first wave with the Slave Lake crew, was reconnoitering with Jamie Coutts when the Shell station by the entrance road exploded, producing a shock wave that could be felt hundreds of yards away. “We could feel it in our bodies,” Sack...