Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousand petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees, is something no Canadian firefighter or emergency manager had experienced. But this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI fire, and not just in the boreal forest. Authorities in California, Australia, Greece, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere have found themselves in the same situation—basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they’ve already seen, instead of what fire weather is capable of now. The data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t, and this—the Lucretius Problem—gave the Fort McMurray Fire an all but unassailable advantage over the people charged with fighting it.