There is destructive fire, which burns down houses and forests, and then there’s transformative fire, which makes familiar objects—like houses—disappear altogether, and leaves whatever’s left—the cement foundation, the steel reinforcement rod holding it together—altered at the molecular level. This is what happened in Slave Lake in 2011: large, expensive things like riding lawnmowers couldn’t be found because they had, more or less, vaporized. Little remained besides cast iron bathtubs and the warped husks of furnaces and cars. In the aftermath, a formal review was conducted, faults were
...more
