Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

And this delineates two of the biggest differences between municipal firefighters and their counterparts in Forestry: time and scale. Structural fires are usually dealt with in a matter of hours; forest fires, despite a stated goal of “out by ten,”[*] may require days or weeks to bring under control.

where structural firefighting is comparable to a rugby match—muscular, confrontational, and contained, with the goal visible at all times—wildland firefighting is more like lacrosse as it was originally conceived: not on a field per se, but across a landscape where it was not so much “played” as waged—like a running battle whose outcome is neither visible nor certain.

“WUI” (rhymes with phooey), an acronym for “wildland-urban interface” (though some call it “wildland-urban in your face”). On a map, the WUI represents the fault line between the forest and the built environment, but over the past thirty years it has also come to represent the sweet spot in North American real estate development: hiking trails out the back door and a scooter-friendly cul-de-sac in front. Today, more than a third of American homes and more than half of Canadian homes are located in the WUI. It is a beautiful place to live, until it goes feral.

These forgotten practices were simple ones: Don’t build your house in the woods, surround it with open fields; not only does this make for convenient planting and pasturage, but those cleared lands also serve as excellent firebreaks. Roofs made of tin or slate go a long way toward foiling embers.

On Beacon Hill, this equation was so hopelessly skewed in the fire’s favor that sending a fire department to face it was like sending plumbers to confront a bursting dam. Most of the hose streams deployed were evaporating long before they reached the flames. The situation facing those patchwork crews in Beacon Hill—now a textbook firetrap—was not so different than that facing the firefighters marching resolutely up the stairs of the World Trade Center: it was nothing they had dealt with before, it didn’t feel right, and the prospects weren’t good, but there were people up there, so they went. Service before self.

It quickly became clear that, not only was there no way to fight this fire, there was no time. There was time only to get the residents out before they were overrun.

We don’t have a forest fire problem, we have a home ignition problem. As soon as you come to that realization, it changes your view on wildfire. —Ray Rasker, cofounder of Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire

the exodus of May 3 was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history.

With the forest already primed to burn, a pyroCb, combined with wind-driven embers and lightning, changed this fire from a localized conflagration into a perpetual motion machine of destruction operating on a regional scale. Given the long-term forecast, this fire could burn as long as the fuel held out, and, in these conditions, the boreal forest was nothing but fuel.

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.

That map, ominous as it was, offered the most graphic proof of the firefighters’ success, which, given the magnitude of their losses, was hard to appreciate from street level. Roughly three hundred municipal, Site, volunteer, and Forestry firefighters, operating across multiple fronts, often miles apart, in brutal heat, toxic air, and negligible visibility without rest or reinforcements, had managed to keep the fire out of the city’s most valuable and populous areas. As grievous as the damage was, and as ferocious the fire, there was, on May 4, still a city left to defend.

the fire, which would soon be described as a “siege event,” attacked the city from every point on the compass. One reason it was able to do this is because the atmosphere never cooled down, and that is what is different about the twenty-first century. The highs are certainly higher, but it is the lows—in all seasons—that are, in their way, more disturbing. A typical spring night in Fort McMurray used to be in the 40s; in May 2016, nighttime temperatures barely dropped below 70°F. In Canada and northern Europe, nights during which the temperature stays above 68°F are referred to as “tropical.” Twenty years ago, Toronto might experience one or two tropical nights in the month of July; in 2020, it counted fourteen. During the same month, Phoenix, Arizona, sustained an average twenty-four-hour temperature of 99°F for the entire month, a new record. Not only can fire sustain itself much more easily in warm temperatures, but ice, snow, rain, and dew will all melt and evaporate more quickly (as will lakes and rivers), making all fuels easier to ignite.

Fire resembles living things in many ways, but there is a crucial difference: as long as there is sufficient wind, fuel, and dry weather, it never gets tired, and it never sleeps.

it provided the Allies with the information necessary to cause maximum damage and loss of life—not by blowing the houses up one at a time, but by burning them down en masse. Generating a firestorm was not a serendipitous by-product, it was the overarching goal:

the flames coursing through the now-roofless and -windowless buildings mimicked the behavior of Japanese anagama “climbing” kilns, which are constructed in a series of ascending chambers through which rivers of fire race for hours on end, generating temperatures well over 2,000°F. According to an official with Hamburg’s Fire Protection Police, the only things that withstood the terrific heat were the steel safes built into the walls of banks.

in the end, all that matters to the fire is fuel, weather, and topography.

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?

“A house is just another kind of tree to a forest fire, right? Once it hits the city there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

One of the features of this fire that made it so hard to fight was how high the flames were; not only did this mean more fire and heat, it also meant more wind and flying embers. By flattening the houses, it would lower the flames dramatically, thereby making them easier to subdue. It’s an unorthodox mode of thinking that only makes sense when you’re using forty-ton machines to remove all available fuel in the face of a rapidly expanding conflagration in an urban setting—something very few firefighters have ever had to do, or even consider doing.

Both men grew up around heavy machinery and were operating before they could drive. Earthmoving was second nature to them, and the basics were summed up by the prophet Isaiah: “Every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.” Hubscher’s father, a longtime supervisor for a local heavy equipment company, and a mentor to both men, had this to add: “You’ve got to be smarter than the dirt.”

Hawley took stock from a vantage on some high ground with his comrades. “It was on fire as far as we could see,” he recalled in a memoir he wrote with two fellow firefighters. “It was never-ending.” “It” was the horizon around Fort McMurray. The city was now a smoking island in a sea of flame.

The Beast of Fort McMurray was born in the forest. What makes a beast a beast in our minds is repetition: in each case, real or imagined, these beings appear repeatedly, impacting different people and places in the larger community. This is standard behavior for monsters, but atypical of fires, and this, even more than its speed, size, or ferocity, is what set this fire apart: the way it persisted—for days—much as monsters do in the stories we tell about them. It is through these repeated encounters that victims and adversaries assess their attacker’s character, establish a relationship, build a narrative, and arrive at a name. Naming and repetition are how myths and legends become anchored in the collective mind, the name serving as a kind of mnemonic avatar for the larger, more complicated whole. We may not read the Bible or the Koran, but we’ve all heard of Satan, and we all have an image that comes to mind.

your skin is ten times thicker, relative to your body, than the habitable portion of the atmosphere is relative to Earth.

Behind the wheel of a Chevy Silverado, a one-hundred-pound woman can generate more than six hundred horsepower as she draws a six-ton trailer at sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone and drinking coffee, in gym clothes on a frigid winter day. Prior to the Petrocene Age, only a king or a pharaoh could have summoned such power, and its equivalent would have required hundreds of enslaved people and draft animals.

During this first century and a half of the Petrocene Age, as we have harnessed, democratized, and amplified fire on demand, we have also unleashed some unintended consequences: a by-product of becoming a petroleum-based society—in other words, a fire-based society—has been the superheating of the atmosphere.

Exhaust fumes, like the atmosphere they flow into, are mostly invisible and easy to keep out of mind, but if that Silverado’s tail pipe were directed back into the vehicle, the driver and all her passengers would be dead in minutes. If the Silverado’s exhaust were piped into the driver’s living room, she and her family would be dead in an hour. But somehow, when we run our cars “outside,” in our shared atmosphere, all the soot and toxic gases magically disappear.

Once in the atmosphere, CO2 will persist for centuries. Meanwhile, methane, the main ingredient in “clean” natural gas, retains heat at least twenty-five times more effectively than CO2. A by-product of fracking, gas flaring, bitumen processing, livestock raising, heating, and home cooking, methane (CH4) remains active in the atmosphere for years after its initial release.

Humanity is now re-creating Eunice Foote’s groundbreaking experiment in real time, only “the receiver containing the gas” is our atmosphere.

The following year, 1908, Henry Ford introduced his multimillion-selling Model T, and Svante Arrhenius published the English-language edition of his magnum opus, Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe. This audacious work, conceived (like the Model T) with a general audience in mind, was the first popular science book to examine the possibility of anthropogenic warming. After describing the “hot-house” theory of Earth’s climate, demonstrated by Saussure in the 1770s and expanded on by Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, and others, Arrhenius went a step further: “The enormous combustion of coal by our industrial establishments suffices to increase the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air to a perceptible degree.”

The kind of disruption Revelle alluded to in the context of drought and rainfall is now referred to as a “phase shift”: a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region’s climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet. Fire behavior is just one indicator, but it is a graphic one, and Revelle’s home state of California offers a good example: in the 1950s, the state’s fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round,

These observations, as clear and measurable as they were, directly challenged a deeply held belief across the scientific community that natural systems regulate themselves, that when disrupted—by flood, fire, plague, or volcano—climatic changes will tend inevitably toward recalibration and equilibrium. This is true, but only up to a point; the horizon of recovery recedes in direct proportion to the scale of the disruption.

The threat of climate change made the front page of The New York Times for the first time in August 1981, and the headline was in all-caps: “STUDY FINDS WARMING TREND THAT COULD RAISE SEA LEVELS.” The study was led by NASA’s James Hansen, and it predicted virtually everything now coming to pass. The catch, in 1981, was that its effects were not yet visible. In other words, it was the Lucretius Problem: the self-protective tendency to favor the status quo over a potentially disruptive scenario one has not witnessed personally.

In 1982, Exxon released graphs projecting carbon dioxide levels through the year 2100, along with the point in time at which resulting climate impacts would break through the “noise” of natural climatic fluctuations and become obvious.

In 1984, as scientists from every relevant discipline were comparing notes at international conferences and arriving at similarly dire conclusions regarding the impact of industrial CO2, the API disbanded its CO2 and Climate Task Force. Forty years on, the API’s decision to turn its back on a century of solid climate science is proving to be the most consequential policy reversal in the history of human civilization.

Despite knowing full well the implications for climate, vehicle manufacturers developed and encouraged a market for SUVs, which, in addition to being larger, heavier, and more resource intensive than ordinary cars, were able (thanks to the GCC) to circumvent mileage requirements because of their designation as “light trucks.”[*12]

now, virtually every year, on every continent where anything grows, records are being broken for ambient temperature as well as for acres burned and homes destroyed.

binges are, by their nature, finite; eventually, you have to come down.

This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made, with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years.

Tactics that worked twenty years ago, or even ten years ago, no longer seem to be as effective.

According to Cal Fire, nine of California’s twenty largest fires have occurred just since 2020. “The fire season used to run from May to October,” a Cal Fire deputy chief named Jonathan Cox told me. “Over the last decade, it’s changed to year-round—and also to twenty-four hours.”

the carbon dioxide generated by events of “planetary scale”—like twenty-first-century wildfires—exceeds the annual CO2 output of many states and countries. To put this in perspective, the CO2 emitted by the Australian bushfires of 2019–20 more than compensated for the global reduction caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It hardly needs to be said that more CO2 leads to more heat retention, which leads to more fires, which leads to more pyroCbs…We are, right now, witnessing the early stages of a self-perpetuating and self-amplifying feedback loop, accompanied by myriad “cascade effects.”

Every year, this global industry releases ten gigatons of carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas formerly sequestered in the planet’s crust.[*2] This is a rate roughly ten times faster than anything scientists can find in the geological record for the past 250 million years, and about one hundred times faster than natural systems were releasing it in more recent pre-industrial times.

“This isn’t a ‘drought,’ ” wrote the climate journalist Bob Berwyn in 2020, “because that implies recovery. This is aridification.” Aridification precedes desertification.

Based on tree ring analysis, it has been determined that the American West is currently in the most severe drought of the past 1,200 years.

scientists have determined that for every 1°C of warming (about 2°F) a 15 percent increase in precipitation is necessary to compensate for the increased evaporation. This is the exact opposite of what is happening in the boreal forest. Around Fort McMurray, average temperatures for the coolest months (October–April) have warmed by 3.4°C (about 6°F) over the past fifty

Like the Anaktuvuk River tundra fire, one of the principal reasons the Tasmanian, Canadian, Russian, and Indonesian fires burned as they did is because the peat beneath them has dried in place, transforming these historically soggy forest floors into vast beds of fire-ready biofuel. Trees are no longer necessary to sustain fire.

muskeg bogs that have desiccated lately to depths of eight feet. Under these conditions, peat bogs (or tundra) can smolder indefinitely, like a coal seam fire.

In Kyoto, Japan, where cherry blossom season has been a national event celebrated for centuries, the date of peak blooming has grown steadily earlier over the past 150 years, tracking almost perfectly with Guy Callendar’s and NASA’s temperature graphs, and with Keeling’s CO2 curve.

Greenland’s ice cap is now melting at a rate ominously described as “nonlinear”—that is, out of phase with any known precedent, pattern, or cycle. Over the past three decades, the average temperature there has increased by 5°F, with summer temperatures soaring 40°F above normal. During this same period, the rate of melting has increased by a more than a third. “What seems clear now,” wrote Jon Gertner, historian and author of The Ice at the End of the World, “is that Greenland is no longer changing in geological time. It is changing in human time.”

The chances of anyone alive today experiencing a year as relatively cool as 1996 are effectively nil.