When fire goes feral
A conversation with John Vaillant, author of ‘Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World.’
On May 1, 2016, the Alberta, Canada, oil boomtown of Fort McMurray received warning of a wildfire in the forest about seven miles to its west. Despite initial reassurances from fire officials, the fire raced toward the city, swelling to more than half a million acres, and on May 3, 88,000 people were forced to evacuate. The fire — locals called it “The Beast” — destroyed more than 2,400 homes, caused $9 billion in damages, and profoundly disrupted the lives of all who experienced it. To author John Vaillant, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, its ferocity served as both a literal and a metaphorical expression of the petroleum industry’s power — as well as a shocking harbinger of the future. Which it was: By mid-May of this year, there were 90 wildfires burning in Alberta, 23 of them out of control.
HCN spoke with Vaillant about his new book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, out this month from Knopf. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: Many of us in the U.S. West don’t know how devastating the Fort McMurray fire was. What set it apart from other North American wildfires?
John Vaillant: The size and the speed — and the fact that it ran right into an oil hub. The only reason Fort McMurray is where it is, and is the size it is now, is because of the bitumen industry, which is a feedstock for petroleum. We import nearly 4 million barrels a day of Fort McMurray petroleum into the United States; it’s our biggest foreign source of petroleum.
There’s a sense in Fort McMurray that we’re a young, strong, hardworking city of achievers. We overcome massive obstacles. So when they saw this fire, there was a sense of, we got this. Fire is nothing new to us up here.
That’s all true, but in the 21st century, it’s harder to accurately predict how fire is going to behave. We’re learning that there are micro-thresholds — when you have, say, 11% humidity instead of 25% humidity and 90 degrees Fahrenheit instead of 75 degrees Fahrenheit — where fire becomes empowered. It goes feral.
HCN: You have an amazing scene where one of the fire managers is on the local radio station, sending a message of “It’s OK, we’re on top of this.” And as he’s being interviewed, the cloud of smoke on the horizon gets blacker and blacker, and the reporter sees him start to sweat. Even people who knew intellectually what might happen just found it hard to imagine.
JV: This is the advantage that climate change has over us. We can have the data, but that doesn’t mean we always interpret it in a meaningful way. So the people whose job it is to protect communities can look at the fire weather index and see that wow, this is serious. And yet that doesn’t automatically translate into action, into oh my gosh, this could overrun the city, we should evacuate now. That’s why one of the things that really resonated for me was the idea of the Lucretius problem.
HCN: Tell us about the Lucretius problem.
JV: Lucretius was a poet and philosopher who lived in Rome during the first century BCE. The Lucretius problem, roughly paraphrased, is that the fool believes the tallest mountain of all is the tallest mountain that he himself has seen. In other words, we’re often limited by personal experience. If you haven’t felt it viscerally yourself, there’s a little part of you that can’t believe it’s possible.
HCN: Nobody could believe the Fort McMurray fire was going to be as bad as it was except for the volunteer firefighters from the nearby town of Slave Lake, who had experienced a fire of similar ferocity in 2011.
JV: The firefighters from Slave Lake were kind of a Greek chorus; the future had already happened to them. In a matter of hours, they lost 500 houses, they lost the library, they lost the city hall, they lost the radio station. They lost a third of the town in an afternoon.
What was most notable about that fire was the heat. People came back looking for the tractor mowers in their garage and found that the garage and the tractor mower had basically vaporized. That’s not what a house fire does, and it’s not what most wildfires do. But it’s what a 21st century fire is capable of doing.
It was important to me to get at the psychological destabilization that results from that kind of fire. This place where you raised your kids, and might have been raised yourself, is gone. It isn’t like, well, the roof burned off, maybe we can rebuild. There’s simply nothing left. You’ve been negated.
It was important to me to get at the psychological destabilization that results from that kind of fire.
HCN: During the Fort McMurray fire, the evacuation orders came very late, but the evacuation itself was almost miraculously smooth. And this was in an oil town with a definite rowdy side — it’s easy to imagine how it could have gone another way. What happened?
JV: I think people are going to be puzzling that out for a long time. Many of the workers in the bitumen camps were evacuated by jet — those facilities are so big that they have their own aerodromes. So most of the people in the endless lines of cars snaking through the flames in Fort McMurray worked in the industry as permanent employees. They owned real estate, they had families.
There’s also a very strong culture of faith in Fort McMurray — not just evangelical Christians, but many Muslims, many Hindus. So there’s community through the neighborhoods and through the churches. And then there’s this sort of Canadian discipline that says, it’s not all about you. The Canadian equivalent of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is peace, order and good government. So during the evacuation, people were stopping at traffic lights even as every single tree in sight was on fire and their kids were in the back screaming and crying. They followed the rules, and those rules saved their lives.
HCN: It’s been almost exactly seven years since the Fort McMurray fire. How has the city changed?
JV: Well, the petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of fire. It’s founded on burning, and if it doesn’t keep burning stuff, it will be out of business. The notion of responding to climate change in a way that might stifle or redirect the energy of the petroleum industry is pretty much off-limits in northern Alberta. And so Fort McMurray is rebuilding as fast as it can, expanding production as fast as it can.
There are plenty of people in Fort McMurray who are still traumatized by the fire. Many first responders have health issues, and some have had to resign themselves to the fact that they’re going to live shorter lives. But the links between the industry and climate change and between climate change and fire are still a little bit abstract. People think: “This was a terrible thing that happened to us, one that we would never want to happen to anybody else. But we’ve got to go on; we’ve got to get back in the saddle.”
We welcome reader letters. Michelle Nijhuis is acting editor-in-chief at High Country News. Email her at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
