Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

While Hamburg’s century-old houses filled with legacy furniture were extremely flammable, Fort McMurray’s modern equivalents were even more so: in addition to their kiln-dried wooden frames, every single house and garage contained a built-in stockpile of petrochemical fuels and accelerants, many of them created by the same companies that design and manufacture incendiary weapons. Add to this every gas grill and vehicle, every set of summer (and winter) tires, every plastic trash bin—the list of flammables is virtually endless. Whatever form their products take, there is no getting around the fact that, wartime or peacetime, petroleum companies trade in fire. Like the boreal forest, their products are made from materials capable of burning with great intensity—even if they aren’t advertised that way. It raises a grave question: What role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?