Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

After midnight, when the traffic is lighter, you might encounter Scheurle (“Shirley”) trailers—oversized flatbeds with a hundred wheels and multiple tractors pulling ultraheavy loads, bits and pieces of cokers and fractionating towers the size of Saturn V rockets. These road trains move at a crawl, but nothing else does and, late at night, 63 is generally left to the semis. Most of them are tandem trailers—B-trains, but not the kind you usually see carrying gas or mail. These are shapes you don’t encounter elsewhere: tubes of liquid nitrogen; heavily reinforced heated cylinders loaded with raw sulfur; others with long, funneled bellies laden with petcoke, the dirty secret of the bitumen industry. Some are emblazoned with hazardous cargo badges, but it’s impossible to read them or any other labeling, not because of the dark, but because every vehicle is coated from end to end with road grit. Thus camouflaged, these massive trucks hurtle through space well over the posted speed limit—all hundred feet and hundred tons of them. This despite the fact that, though the road may be clear, it is frozen solid, every grain and pebble glazed with ice. Road salt is only effective to -20°F; any colder, and repeated pressure from passing tires compresses frost and snow into black ice. On 63, in winter, black ice becomes a kind of unofficial road surface.