Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

The semis are fast, but the pickups are faster, and there is something lethal about ice and oil and money and men. When a southbound Ford 150, four beers in and seventy-five payments to go, collides with a northbound Kenworth T800 hauling a B-train of empty sulfur tankers, the combined impact speed may be more than 160 miles an hour. A witness to such a collision described it this way: “The front end of the pickup truck was destroyed in a manner I had never seen before: a thousand-petaled peony blossom—tiny strips all peeling away from an epicentre of densely fused aluminum and steel.” An impact like that can throw a body a hundred feet or more. Sometimes, the only way to find them in the cold and dark is with infrared sensors, and these are standard equipment on Fort McMurray’s emergency vehicles. One veteran paramedic I met has personally attended more than a hundred fatalities—all of them within a fast hour of Fort McMurray. “Most of them are head-ons,” he said. When I asked him how he handled it, I immediately wished I hadn’t. His eyes, an arresting Slavic blue, fixed on mine as he said, “Do I look normal to you?”