Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity.

As soon as smoke was spotted, wildland firefighters were dispatched, supported by a helicopter and water bombers. First responders were shocked by what they saw: by the time a helicopter with a water bucket got over it, the smoke was already black and seething, a sign of unusual intensity. Despite the firefighters’ timely intervention, the fire grew from 4 acres to 150 in two hours. Wildfires usually settle down overnight, as the air cools and the dew falls, but by noon the following day this one had expanded to nearly 2,000 acres. Its rapid growth coincided with a rash of broken temperature records across the North American subarctic that peaked at 90°F on May 3 in a place where temperatures are typically in the 60s. On that day, Tuesday, a smoke- and wind-suppressing inversion lifted, winds whipped up to twenty knots, and a monster leaped across the Athabasca River.

Within hours, Fort McMurray was overtaken by a regional apocalypse that drove serial firestorms through the city from end to end—for days. Entire neighborhoods burned to their foundations beneath a towering pyrocumulus cloud typically found over erupting volcanoes. So huge and energetic was this fire-driven weather system that it generated hurricane-force winds and lightning that ignited still more fires many miles away. Nearly 100,000 people were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire. All afternoon, cell phones and dashcams captured citizens cursing, praying, and weeping as they tried to escape a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame.

A week later, the fire’s toll conjured images of a nuclear blast: there was not just “damage,” there was total obliteration. Trying to articulate what she saw during a tour of the fire’s aftermath, one official said, “You go to a place where there was a house and what do you see on the ground? Nails. Piles and piles of nails.” More than 2,500 homes and other structures were destroyed, and thousands more were damaged; 2,300 square miles of forest were burned. By the time the first photos were released, the fire had already belched 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, much of it from burning cars and houses. The Fort McMurray Fire, destined to become the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, continued to burn, not for days, but for months. It would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year.

Canada contains 10 percent of the world’s forests, vast tracts of which are uninhabited.

Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in cooperation with fire scientists from Canada and Mexico, issues a document called the North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook, which attempts to predict the likelihood of wildfires across the continent. The Outlook includes maps for each month of fire season, and they are color-coded, with red indicating a likelihood of increased fire activity and green indicating a decrease. Like 2015 before them, the monthly maps for 2016 showed a lot more red than green, and the map for May showed more red than all the others: in addition to large swaths of Mexico, the American Midwest, and all of Hawai’i, red covered much of southern Canada—from the Great Lakes all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

Despite being virtually unknown outside of Canada and the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray has become, in the past two decades, the fourth-largest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks. In terms of overtime logged and dollars earned, it is, without a doubt, the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on the continent. In 2016, two years past a decade-long boom that ended with a sudden drop in global crude oil prices, the median household income was still nearly $200,000 a year. Fort McMurray has earned several nicknames over the years, and one of them is Fort McMoney.

Not many regions self-select as rigorously as northern Alberta does, and Fort McMurray selects for workers—tough, adventurous team players, highly motivated to do what it takes and prosper. That includes wildfire fighters, and Alberta Forestry’s wildfire crews—with a territory ranging from tallgrass prairie and parkland to the Rocky Mountains and the boreal forest—are considered among the best in the world.

Hardworking and independent-minded, Alberta, too, prides itself on a mythic legacy built around cattle, horses, cowboys, and oil, further energized by deep wells of “get ’er done” can-do-itiveness, evangelical Christianity, and cantankerous alienation from its national capital.

Bitumen (pronounced BITCH-amin) is a kind of degenerate cousin to crude oil, more commonly known as tar or asphalt. Surrounding Fort McMurray, just below the forest floor, is a bitumen deposit the size of New York State. Sometimes referred to as the Alberta tar sands, or the oil sands, it is one of the biggest known petroleum reserves in the world. In terms of potential barrel volume, it is in a class with Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran. But as abundant as it is, there’s a catch: it’s not oil. It is not, strictly speaking, even bitumen; it is what geologists call “bituminous sand.” Bituminous sand is to a barrel of oil what a sandbox soaked in molasses is to a bottle of rum. Even after you’ve dug it out of the ground and separated it from its gritty matrix, you’re no closer to a viable form of energy. It’s still just bitumen—excellent for tarring roofs and paving roads, but so nonflammable you can put out a campfire with it.

The D11 weighs more than a hundred tons, and its blade is twenty-two feet wide; it can plow down a forest like mowing a lawn. But this is entirely in keeping with the scale of things up here; working alongside the D11s are Komatsu D575s, which are even bigger. Once the forest has been removed, enormous electric shovels excavate the bituminous sand in boulder-sized chunks that can weigh a hundred tons and occasionally contain complete dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous Period. These garage-sized payloads are dumped into a “hauler,” and the Caterpillar T797 hauler is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world. It is three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons—unloaded. There are hundreds of machines like this operating in the mines north of Fort McMurray.

The tailings ponds alone cover well over a hundred square miles and contain more than a quarter of a trillion gallons of contaminated water and effluent from the bitumen upgrading process. There is no place for this toxic sludge to go except into the soil, or the air, or, if one of the massive earthen dams should fail, into the Athabasca River. For decades, cancer rates have been abnormally high in the downstream community of Fort Chipewyan.

Underappreciated by most of us down south is the fact that all of this—man and machine alike—must function year-round, twenty-four hours a day, across some of the world’s most extreme temperature fluctuations. Untreated diesel fuel begins to gel at 15°F and bulldozer blades can shatter at -35°F, but Fort McMurray sees temperatures in the -40s every winter and has posted lows in the -60s. The fire department’s pumper trucks have built-in heaters to keep the water from freezing en route to a call. And yet, with increasing regularity, the region is seeing summer highs in the 90s. Extremes like this put terrific stress not just on metals, but also on hydraulic hoses, lubricated gears, and any fluid that must be kept flowing at a consistent viscosity.

While the end products rendered from bitumen are ultimately useful, taking the form of synthetic crude oil, diesel fuel, and feedstock for other petroleum products, its journey into a form recognizable to a petroleum engineer or a southern oil buyer is an arduous and expensive one, requiring enormous quantities of water, chemicals, and foreign capital. But most of all, it takes brute force, and that brute force is fire. The preferred extraction method, which now accounts for about 80 percent of the region’s bitumen production, is steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAG-D. SAG-D involves layered arrays of wellbores and piping through which steam is injected, in situ, in order to melt the bitumen directly out of its confusion of sand and clay. In both SAG-D and surface mining operations, the steam used to melt the bitumen is heated with natural gas, and the quantities required to do this are astounding.

Natural gas, which is about 80 percent methane, is measured, not in gallons or barrels, but in cubic feet. According to Canada’s National Energy Board, the bitumen industry uses more than 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day (the energy equivalent of 350,000 barrels of oil), for the sole purpose of separating bitumen from sand. Canada is the fourth-largest producer of natural gas in the world, and in 2017 nearly a third of Canada’s total production was devoted to this purpose.

Alberta has taken these liabilities into account and, in order for the bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs must be nil.[*2] There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for emissions.

The river those hunters were referring to was the Athabasca—specifically, the area around present-day Fort McMurray, where bitumen forms a black and sandy stratum through the river valley. On particularly hot days, it will trickle down the south- and west-facing cliffs and pool up on the riverbank; in some places it will flow into the river itself, causing temporary slicks. If the weather is hot and the wind is right, you can smell it before you see it. In winter these drips freeze in place, giving the impression that the cliff faces are weeping black tears, but even at twenty below, they carry an odor of roofing tar.

Employees in Alberta’s bitumen industry are among the highest-paid petroleum workers in the world; nonetheless, heavy debt is rampant, and bankruptcies, layoffs, and foreclosures are common.

Following “Colonel” Edwin Drake’s legendary strike in August 1859, farmland around Titusville began selling for staggering sums. So many wells were dug, so quickly and in such close proximity, it seemed as if the local fields had suddenly produced bumper crops of wooden oil derricks. Containing these wells once they’d been tapped was not an exact science, and, in Titusville, the aptly renamed Oil Creek flowed—and sometimes burned—with a surface layer of shimmering petroleum. Meanwhile, wagonloads of leaking barrels turned the surrounding roads into reeking quagmires through which draft horses slogged and staggered, blackened to the withers by a slurry of urine, feces, and crude oil. The combination was toxic, and a notable feature of these sorry animals was that, below the neck, they had no hair.

Crude is not particularly useful as energy or illumination in its raw form, but its constituents are. These constituents, known as “fractions,” are rendered from oil much the way whiskey is rendered from mash in a distillery: when heated in a sealed vessel, the volatile fractions will evaporate off at different temperatures. “Lighter” fractions (gases like naphtha, propane, benzene, etc.) will come off first, at temperatures below 500°F. Among these lighter fractions are the main ingredients of gasoline, but in the 1860s, with the automobile still decades away and no obvious use for such a dangerously explosive substance, they were discarded, usually into the nearest creek. Meanwhile, heavier fractions such as heating and lubricating oils need higher temperatures—up to 1,000°F—in order to separate.

Left behind, virtually un-distillable, are heavy fuel oils such as bunker fuel, and also bitumen. In order to glean any remaining hydrocarbons from these ultraheavy residues, they must be put through a second, more rigorous heating process in a pressurized tank called a coker. There are a number of these huge vessels at the plants north of Fort McMurray, and their purpose is to “crack” the remaining longchain hydrocarbon molecules into smaller, more useful fractions. Left over at the end of this hellacious and energy-intensive process is a fused mass of ash and carbon called petroleum coke, or petcoke. Petcoke burns like coal, only hotter, but because it is also significantly dirtier, it has fallen out of favor as a fuel for domestic power plants and blast furnaces.[*6]

Étienne Lenoir was already taking it: later that same year, he mounted his engine on a three-wheeled wooden cart. It was noisy and slow, but it marked the first time in history that liquid fuel had been combined with an internal combustion engine and a wheeled vehicle for the purpose of individual mobility, thus achieving a kind of self-powered, “automotive”—not flight, exactly, but arguably transcendence, especially when you consider how most people got around in those days. This era-defining, world-changing invention took a more recognizable shape in 1863 (twenty years before Daimler and Benz), when Lenoir unveiled his Hippomobile, a four-wheeled, multi-passenger vehicle equipped with a steering wheel up front and an engine in the rear.

on the banks of the Athabasca River at a place called Pelican Portage, eighty miles upstream from Fort McMurray. There, in the summer of 1897, drillers with the Geological Survey of Canada hit a void at eight hundred feet, releasing a spectacular jet of methane (natural gas), peppered with walnut-sized chunks of iron pyrite that blasted skyward at the speed of bullets. The sound—something like a fighter jet—was audible three miles away. The well was estimated to be producing more than 8 million cubic feet of gas per day—enough to heat every house and building in modern Fort McMurray. But in 1897, with no place to sell it, no way to capture it, and no way to put this explosive genie back in its bottle, the drillers did the next best thing: they lit it on fire. Before being finally capped, it burned, intermittently, for twenty-one years—a

Today, petcoke is a pariah of the energy industry that no one wants to be associated with, and mountains of it can be found in railyards and refinery complexes across the border states of the Midwest. The Koch family has seen an opportunity here, and Oxbow Energy Solutions and Koch Carbon (both owned by members of the family) are two of the world’s largest exporters. Since 2010, petcoke, along with the terrific pollution it generates, has become one of North America’s biggest exports. In 2016 alone, 8 million metric tons were shipped to India, where environmental regulations are poorly enforced, a fact borne out by the lethally toxic state of the country’s air. In 2018, China imported more than 7 million tons. Japan and Mexico import even more. In total, the United States exports roughly 90 million tons of petcoke a year, and much of this is derived from Alberta bitumen.

Fire synthesizes its surroundings. Those surroundings are cultural as much as natural, and choices about fire practices and regimes will inevitably be made on the basis of social values and philosophies, as integrated by political institutions. Science can enlighten that process but will not determine it. —Stephen J. Pyne, “Pyromancy”

Is it possible to prepare people to flee for their lives without inciting panic?

There were other more esoteric scales that Schmitte did not refer to, but was also well acquainted with, and one of these was the Fine Fuels Moisture Code, which measures the dryness of leaves, needles, and other forest litter. On this open-ended scale, anything above 92.5 is considered “Extreme”; the rating for May 3 was 95. There was also the Duff Moisture Code, which rates the flammability of compacted organic matter on the forest floor; the Drought Code, which calculates the dryness of deeper soil, trees, and logs; and the Buildup Index, which measures the density of flammable biomass—all of them were in the 100th percentile for their categories. Meanwhile, the Fire Weather Index, an aggregate derived by combining more specific fire risk data, was effectively off the charts: where 21 is considered “Very High,” and 33 is considered “Extreme,” the index that day was pushing 40.

Across North America, and around the world, fires are burning over longer seasons and with greater intensity than at any other time in human history.

In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience.

The forecast for Wednesday, May 4, and for the foreseeable future, was for optimal fire weather. In fact, even more extreme conditions lay ahead. The closest rain was weeks away.

Eight miles above the city, the fire looked like the Mount Saint Helens eruption—a billowing roil of smoke so dense with wood ash and petroleum soot that it appeared almost pyroclastic. Deep inside this fire-powered storm, scattered bands of firefighters battled on, all but invisible in the gloom.

Anyone who wasn’t operating a machine, managing a hose, or actively supervising was running through backyards with portable extinguishers putting out ember fires. Out on the street, batteries of pumper trucks sent water flowing freely across every surface; between the surge and flicker of the fire and the metronomic flash of fire engine lights, the streets appeared to pulse with electric blood. And yet, despite the torrents of water being directed toward the fire, crews and trucks were forced, again and again, to fall back as row after row of homes succumbed—Prospect, Siltstone, Shalestone. Each one meant another hundred houses gone.

The effort took its toll: some men were crying; others stared into the hypnotizing flames as if they were shell-shocked. A firefighter named Jerron Hawley fell to his knees, wavering on all fours so long that his friend, a paramedic, wondered if he might be having a “jammer”—a heart attack. He wasn’t, but exhaustion of a profound and mind-altering kind was setting in across the city. Some members hadn’t slept since the night of May 2. After gathering himself, Hawley took stock from a vantage on some high ground with his comrades. “It was on fire as far as we could see,” he recalled in a memoir he wrote with two fellow firefighters. “It was never-ending.”

In June 1953, Life, one of the most popular weekly magazines of the day, ran a twenty-page article entitled “The Canopy of Air,” which addressed the suspected link between warming temperatures, rapid glacial retreat, and industrial CO2. Three years later, in 1956, Plass would discuss his findings in American Scientist: “It is not usually appreciated,” he wrote in the July issue, “that very small changes in the average temperature can have appreciable influence on the climate. For example,…a rise in the average temperature of perhaps only 4°C would bring a tropical climate to most of the earth’s surface.”

The 20 percent increase in industrial CO2 that Revelle predicted in 1957 was achieved in 2004, along with the anticipated atmospheric changes. The kind of disruption Revelle alluded to in the context of drought and rainfall is now referred to as a “phase shift”: a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region’s climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet. Fire behavior is just one indicator, but it is a graphic one, and Revelle’s home state of California offers a good example: in the 1950s, the state’s fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost).[*5] Meanwhile, the drought Revelle predicted has become a serious and persistent condition—winter and summer, threatening the viability of mountain forests, agricultural lands, and the waterways that link them. As for fire tornadoes, those exceeded even Revelle’s powers of prediction.

While the crucial link between fossil fuel burning and carbon dioxide garnered neither the attention nor the action it deserved, Roger Revelle and his colleagues did secure funding to study it. Given where things stand today, it is sobering to consider that Revelle addressed these matters, accurately and emphatically, more than thirty years before the NASA scientist James Hansen gave his own historic testimony before Congress. Since Revelle’s presentations on Capitol Hill, three generations, amounting to 5 billion people, have been added to the world’s population, along with billions of fuel-burning vehicles, engines, stoves, generators, and power plants of all sizes. In that time, annual CO2 emissions have increased fivefold from their already-climate-altering 1950s levels.

It may come as a surprise today, but in 1958, the potential for CO2-driven climate disruption was part of the public school curriculum. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the director Frank Capra (It’s A Wonderful Life, etc.) collaborated with Bell Telephone (AT&T)—the Standard Oil of telecommunications—on a series of educational films that were aired on national television and distributed widely through American schools. Using

It was estimated later that, during the single blinding burst that caused Mount Arawang to briefly disappear, an area of roughly three hundred acres ignited in less than a tenth of a second. Tom Bates had managed to document the most dramatic instance of exterior flashover ever observed. The Canberra fire tornado of 2003 was rated an EF-3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with horizontal winds of 160 miles per hour, roughly equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane. As the first documented example of its kind, it was a milestone—another harbinger of twenty-first-century fire.

common cause of wildfires (and the only cause in the uninhabited Arctic and boreal regions). The drier and hotter peat bogs and forests become, the easier they are to ignite by lightning and other means and, with milder winters, the earlier in the season they are able to do so. The drier the fuel and the hotter the air, the more explosive the fires, the more intensely they burn, the harder they are to extinguish, and the more likely they are to produce their own weather in the form of wind and pyrocumulus clouds, which can generate fire whirls, tornadoes, and more lightning, resulting in yet more fires that will perpetuate themselves for as long as fuel and weather conditions allow. Over the past several decades, this feedback loop has been tightening, not only in the circumboreal forest but across virtually every major forest system from Norway to Chile.

As these environments grow warmer (for the first time since the last glaciation), the frozen, inert organic matter beneath them thaws and then decays, releasing still more CO2. Tundra may be the least charismatic of terrestrial ecosystems, but it possesses hidden depths: there is twice as much carbon dioxide bound up in frozen Arctic soils as is currently in our atmosphere. For the first time since the Ice Age, this process of thaw-and-release is currently under way across the Northern Hemisphere. Vast quantities of methane are trapped in these ice formations as well. In 2020, we saw the greatest annual increase in methane release since systematic measuring began in the 1980s.

The Fort McMurray Fire was barely a week old and it had already entered the record books: 90,000 people evacuated; 2,500 structures destroyed and another 500 damaged; nearly a thousand square miles of forest burned; an internationally significant mining and pipeline operation severely curtailed; overland transportation crippled; hundreds of firefighters and dozens of aircraft engaged with no end in sight. It was an unprecedented scenario, in both the annals of modern urban fire and peacetime resource extraction.

On May 9, Chief Darby Allen addressed the public on TV from Fire Hall 5. Standing behind him was Rachel Notley, the premier of Alberta. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Allen said. “I spoke to my colleagues from Forestry, and many of the fire conditions, and the way the fire behaved—no one’s ever seen anything like this. This is rewriting the book—the way this thing happened, the way it traveled, the way it behaved. So, they’re rewriting their formulas on how fires behave based on this fire.”

In the city’s twenty-five thousand or so surviving homes, apartments, restaurants, and grocery stores, a regime change was under way. It began, most often, in the kitchen. After a week or two in the unseasonal heat, perishables began to ripen and then to rot. Alberta is beef country, but hunting and fishing are popular here as well, and the abundance of meat, combined with high wages and a big-box mentality, meant that, in addition to refrigerators, meat freezers were common items in garages and basements. As the temperature rose, and all that meat decomposed, gases were generated, pressure built, and seals failed. By mid-May, many of the city’s fridges and freezers stood in pools of clotting blood. Inside, the contents took on lives of their own.

Warm and contained, with unlimited food and nothing to disturb them, breeding conditions were ideal. Outside, patrolling police, firefighters, and gas and electricity technicians saw nothing out of the ordinary as they made their rounds, but inside, any building with food in it was being colonized and transformed.

Insurance adjusters were some of the first to enter these putrid, teeming habitats, and one compared some of the sights he encountered to “CSI murder scenes.” By then, many generations of flies had hatched, multiplied, and died; the growth was exponential. Another local adjuster opened a utility door in a client’s house only to find the interior seething with mice. In the malls around town, the supermarkets had transformed into Olympic-sized petri dishes; floors and shelves were carpeted with dead flies while the cavernous spaces above buzzed and swirled with the living. Left to their own devices, the lobsters in the live tank at Save-On-Foods had turned on each other, but the mice never had it so good. Where there weren’t vermin, there was rampant mold in a rainbow of colors. One adjuster marveled at the bread aisle, where every bag had blossomed into a psychedelic terrarium—save for one brand. After three weeks, the Wonder Bread looked as fresh as it had on May 3.

All told, about twenty thousand refrigerators and freezers were declared biohazards and had to be thrown away. Strapped shut and wheeled to the curb, they still stank, and this drew bears in from the surrounding woods.

By the time the fire was three weeks old, it had burned over a million acres of forest, more than two thousand square miles. Still out of control and growing by the day, the fire had spread eastward into the neighboring province of Saskatchewan.

Whether it was due to fire, water, smoke, vermin, or mold, thousands of surviving houses were compromised in a myriad of ways, including shrapnel damage from the many things that exploded. Even months later, roofs and water pipes that had appeared unscathed began to leak, and electrical wiring shorted out for no discernible reason.

Because of the extraordinary volume of claims, insurance adjusters were flown into Fort McMurray from all over Canada and the U.S.

Predatory delay, as Steffen defines it, is “the deliberate slowing of change to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will be paid by others.”