Alberta won't stop burning. Here’s why | The Star - Toronto Star

The 2016 fire both horrified and transfixed Canadians because it seemed so unusual — apocalyptic videos showed families fleeing suburban homes as ash rained down and flames devoured their neighbourhoods. That a fire could bring a region of 125,000 people, the economic engine of its province, to its knees seemed like a freak event.

It wasn’t. Alberta has always had fires. But as the planet warms and the global climate shifts, wildfires are becoming bigger, more intense, more destructive and more frequent.

Alberta won’t stop burning. Neither will B.C., Ontario, Quebec, the Prairies, the territories, the Maritimes nor any of the 96 per cent of Canada’s communities near forest and grassland.

“We got our eyes opened up here during the wildfire, and shame on us,” said Jody Butz, the fire chief for the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which encompasses Fort McMurray. “Did we really truly adapt and learn from it?”

No one event can be fully attributed to climate change, and the Fort McMurray fire was probably sparked by a human, but a few compelling factors were at play in how intensely it raged.

That year a below-average snowpack melted early amid unusually hot temperatures. Vegetation baked into perfect wildfire fuel. Some of this was attributable to 2016’s El Nino, a periodic pattern of warm, dry weather that’s becoming more powerful. Longer fire seasons and more incidents of extreme fire weather are also caused by climate change, and likely contributed to the wildfire’s intensity, the federal government found.

In Alberta, 52 percent of the population sees solid or conclusive evidence climate change is happening, according to a 2018 poll by Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission, an independent economics organization. Of those people, 46 per cent think the warming was caused by natural patterns, not human activity.

An aerial view of the vast expanse of forest burned during the Fort McMurray wildfire, taken May 13, 2016 — just 12 days after the fire was first detected. Jason Franson/The Canadian Press For someone living in downtown Calgary, or any major city, the threat might feel distant. It’s not. Change has arrived as a series of small, accumulating inconveniences.

You used to wake up under a smoke-choked sky for a few days every August, but now for entire weeks or months you keep windows shut. Maybe your asthma’s a bit worse. You loved summertime bonfires as a kid, but near-constant burn bans mean your own children will rarely have them. Your taxes are going up — disaster recovery costs money.

Flames nip at the edges of outer suburbs and smaller cities. Every summer on average, fires in Canada burn an area nearly four-and-a-half times larger than Prince Edward Island.

“It's not going to go away,” said Mike Flannigan, a longtime wildfire researcher and director of the Western Partnership for Wildland Fire Science at the University of Alberta. “We have to learn to live with fire.”

To start a wildfire, three key ingredients are needed: dry, hot and windy weather, fuel to burn and a spark. Climate change contributes to all of them, said a federal report released in April.

Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world and it’s “effectively irreversible,” the report said. More than half of the warming was likely caused by humans, and our climate will almost certainly get hotter.

The highest increase of days with extreme fire conditions is expected in the western prairies where droughts are also predicted to become more frequent and intense, leaving more dead vegetation for wildfires to devour.

“Our area burned in Canada has doubled since the ’70s,” said Flannigan. “This is because of human-caused climate change.”

Milder winters, meanwhile, have allowed for the rapid spread of the mountain pine beetle, which kills certain types of pine trees, turning swaths of forest into dead, red-needled wildfire fuel.

A warming climate also increases the likelihood of lightning strikes, Flannigan said. About half of all wildfires are caused by lightning and these fires tend to be more destructive, accounting for about 85 per cent of the areas burned in Canada annually.

These high-intensity fires destroy vegetation that would normally absorb runoff from rain and snowmelt and help prevent flooding. The spring rains that cause flooding don't do much to dampen the fire risk — the moisture can lead to a burst of vegetation growth, which can dry out within a week and become fire fuel, Flannigan said.

The increased wildfires also release carbon dioxide that fuels even more climate change.

Canada’s three most destructive wildfires — Kelowna in 2003, Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016 — have happened during the past two decades. The 2017 fire season was the third in a row to have above-average impacts on communities, such as evacuations and poor air quality. In 2018, B.C. had its worst fire season on record.

Year to year, the number of wildfires and the area they burn vary wildly. But the big picture trend is clear, said Brian Wiens, director of planning and operations at the federal government’s Northern Forestry Centre in Edmonton. “This changing climate is very conducive to more wildfire.”

Forests and grasslands need fire to be healthy. It renews plant life, restores nutrients in the soil and allows a diversity of species. First Nation communities have understood this for thousands of years and used fire for a variety of purposes.

Canadian governments in the late 1800s and 1900s suppressed nearly all wildfires and prohibited controlled burns, said Wiens.

“What we've discovered over time is that fire actually has a very substantial role in the ecosystem. (That’s) an aspect of knowledge that has always been inherent in most Indigenous cultures.”

In Banff National Park, a 90-minute drive west of Calgary, visitors expect thick layers of pine to blanket the slopes. But the natural forest once looked vastly different, said Jane Park, a fire specialist with Parks Canada in Banff: “A hundred years ago, it used to be more open.”

Those mountainsides are now unnaturally clogged with trees. In 1983, Banff became the first place in Canada to restart the practice of prescribed burns. This spring, Park and her team thinned the west side of Sulphur Mountain, a popular destination with a gondola and hiking trails. The Town of Banff lies directly on the other side.

“We’re trying to … reduce the number of ember showers that could come from a fire starting on the other side of Sulphur Mountain, going up Sulphur Mountain and spitting embers over the mountain into town,” said Park.

Banff’s firefighters are working to implement Canada’s FireSmart program which makes simple recommendations: Clear brush at least 10 metres from your house; build with fire-resistant materials, especially on your roof; replace highly flammable conifer trees with deciduous ones; when a fire is coming, get rid of fire-prone welcome mats, brooms and barbecues.

Banff adopted the program in 2003, after a fire in the Kootenay Valley came within 50 kilometres. The municipality offers free FireSmart assessments and financial incentives for residents to swap out trees and combustible roofs. It also thins wooded areas within the town’s boundaries.

It’s not perfect — flammable cedar roofs are still the norm in some neighbourhoods — but community support has been strong, said fire chief Silvio Adamo.

Banff’s fire department recommends residents build homes with fire-resistant materials, particularly roofs, and clear brush from around houses. Combustible cedar roofs are still typical in Banff neighbourhoods and highly flammable conifer trees pose a fire risk, especially when they are close to homes. Photos: Christina Ryan for Star Calgary “It’s a special place,” he said. “That means you invest and you buy in to living in an environment like this, a natural wooded environment.”

Community support has come slower elsewhere. In the foothills east of Banff, Rocky View County is trying to make its communities more FireSmart. Many parts are at extreme risk of fire, said district fire chief Marcus Weckesser, including the quaint, forested hamlet of Bragg Creek.

Buildings on Bragg Creek’s main street are surrounded by lush greenery that could dry out and fuel fire and the county is making some areas more FireSmart, Weckesser said, and is countering public resistance with more education.

Grass fires in Lethbridge County, which covers a large area of southern Alberta, forced thousands to evacuate in 2012. These fires aren’t as intense as forest fires, but dry grass can burn alarmingly quickly.

Three years ago, the county held a FireSmart open house, said Larry Randle, director of community services. “It was not very well-attended,” he said. Since then, he said, residents’ willingness to act has increased as they observe climate change happening around them. “There is a slow but steady increasing awareness.”

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Since the 2016 wildfire in Fort McMurray, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo has reworked wildfire prevention, focusing on planning and prevention for every community, down to the neighbourhood level. This has its challenges. For example, in the remote community of Fort Chipewyan — a First Nation hamlet that’s accessible only by air for most of the year as it has no permanent road — evacuations would happen by boat, along the Athabasca River.

Butz, the Wood Buffalo fire chief, said he believes these hyperlocal plans will allow communities to survive when wildfire strikes next.

“The days of making a plan at a very high level and throwing it down and trying to implement it for everybody else to follow is very hierarchical… I think our society has changed,” he said.

Fire-resistant communities are especially key in reducing damage from extreme fires like the one that engulfed Fort McMurray, when not even the most advanced firefighting techniques can stop the oncoming walls of flames, said Glenn McGillivray, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction. “It's like spitting into hell,” he added.

Last year, a report by Natural Resources Canada staff, which had input from First Nations, academics and local authorities, laid out a blueprint for tackling fires over the next decade. In one key section, it recognizes the need to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into wildfire science.

Wiens, from the Northern Forestry Centre, said the government is discussing how to implement the report’s recommendations, including a reinvestment of research money for wildfire science which has steadily declined since the 1970s.

The federal government’s 2019 budget includes $48 million over five years for on-reserve infrastructure to prevent climate change-related disasters, including wildfire. It also put aside $211 million over four years for First Nation emergency management, and a proposed investment in making reserves FireSmart.

Equally crucial is the recognition that First Nations must be equal and meaningful partners in the process, said Kluane Adamek, the Yukon Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations.

“(Governments) can’t be looking at First Nations as a bystander or a stakeholder in this situation,” said Adamek.

First Nation communities are innovating to adapt to climate change and reduce carbon emissions, she said.

Adamek pointed to the XY Charlie Crew, Yukon-based wildland firefighters run by Ta’an Kwach’an First Nation’s Da Daghay Development Corporation.

“It’s so powerful to see that, to see our young people wanting to be part of the solution and to be supported by all levels of government to do that,” she said. “There’s a place for science and there’s a place for traditional knowledge. One can’t come before the other.”

Flannigan suggests governments might also have to block public access to places that are likely to burn during extreme fire weather. They might have to upgrade electricity infrastructure. For example, sparks from aging power lines likely ignited the disastrous Camp wildfire in California last summer that killed 86.

The stakes are high. Earth is almost certainly getting warmer but because oceans are slow to heat, the full impact of greenhouse gas emissions now won’t be apparent for decades. “Even if we stopped producing greenhouse gases today, we will continue to warm for the next 50 years because there's lag in the system,” said Flannigan.

More heat and more fuel means today’s fires can release more energy, which generates high winds, said Flannigan. The most powerful can produce thunderstorms, called pyroCbs — pyrocumulonimbus clouds — which can spawn tornadoes of flame. PyroCbs have happened in the past, but “literature suggests that we're starting to see a lot more” that are increasingly powerful, Flannigan said.

One example of this is Fort McMurray — in 2016, a pyroCb spawned lightning which sparked new fires that added to the crisis. “The Fort McMurray fire was only the second fire I know that has done that,” said Flannigan.

Megafires also produce smoke that can affect air quality hundreds of kilometres away. Last summer, Edmonton’s air quality was briefly the worst in the world thanks to wildfire smoke from B.C.

Smoke hangs over the High Level bridge in Edmonton on Aug. 15, 2018. Last summer that city’s air quality was briefly the worst in the world. Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton Scientists are studying how increased smoke exposure will impact our health, said Sarah Henderson, an environmental health scientist at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. Smoky conditions can trigger asthma and increase the risk of chronic disease.

“Try to protect yourself,” she advised. “The less smoke you breathe, the better off you’re going to be.”

More fires are also likely to threaten our drinking water.

Extreme fires usually burn moss, leaves and other vegetation that normally shields the ground from erosion. Rainwater can then wash newly exposed contaminants into the watershed, said Uldis Silins, a forest hydrologist with the University of Alberta.

Sometimes the runoff downstream of urban fires contains mercury or toxic compounds. It can also deposit nutrient-rich sediment, which allows algae to grow where it normally wouldn’t, or dissolved organic carbon, which can form compounds with potential health concerns when mixed with chlorine that’s used to disinfect drinking water.

Treating these problems is possible for the most part but costly, said Monica Emelko, an environmental engineer at the University of Waterloo who helped Fort McMurray restore its water treatment plant.

Fort McMurray has already spent more than $5 million on post-wildfire water treatment, Emelko said, and it could cost more in the future. The municipality had to pay to manage the risk of algal blooms and faces ongoing increases in its water treatment costs to tackle the dissolved organic carbon.

“These effects can make their way downstream for tens of kilometres or more,” Emelko added, affecting communities far away from the fire.

Changes in the watershed can last for a long time, said Silins, who was part of a research team that studied the fallout of 2003 wildfires near southern Alberta’s Waterton Lakes National Park. The extra sediment didn’t go away in the 10 years after that fire, Silins said.

In 2017, an extreme wildfire that hit Waterton stirred up soot and sediment that continue to make the park’s Cameron Falls run black after heavy rains.

“The question is, if we see these kinds of fires more often… are we going to start to see larger changes to water resources that are important for humans?” he said.

More humans live, work and play in fire-prone landscapes than ever before, meaning there’s a higher chance that fires will destroy communities and important infrastructure.

After the 2016 Fort McMurray fire forced oilsands operations to shut down, the GDP dropped by 0.4 per cent, Statistics Canada found in 2017. It was also the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history, racking up $3.58 billion in damage.

“Every Canadian pays for Fort McMurray in one way or another,” said McGillivray.

Shortly before the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, the Alberta government slashed $15 million from its wildfire prevention and management budget.( Later, it said it didn’t believe the change impacted its response to the catastrophe.)

It’s unclear what the 2019 fire season will look like. On May 15, Natural Resources Canada predicted mostly average fire weather for Alberta from May to September. B.C. and the Yukon, however, will be at higher risk than normal.

A week later, an out-of-control wildfire near the northern Alberta town of High Level forced 5,000 residents to evacuate. The flames devoured an area larger than Calgary, came within five kilometres of the community and were too intense for firefighters to tackle from the ground. Many evacuees sheltered in Slave Lake, a town five hours to the south that was devastated by wildfire in 2011.

This satellite image captured by NASA’s Earth Observatory shows fires burning near High Level Alberta as well as Slave Lake and Grand Prairie. Joshua Stevens/NASA Earth Observatory Nine out-of-control wildfires burned in Alberta on May 30 and 10,000 people in total had been evacuated. One, the Chuckegg Creek fire, southwest of High Level, grew to more than 2,300 square kilometres. The smoke from these fires turned the Edmonton skyline an eerie dense orange and a film of ash covered cars. Environment Canada issued an air quality alert, advising those with respiratory difficulties to stay indoors.

Smoke from wildfires in Alberta turned the Edmonton skyline orange on May 30, 2019. Codie McLachlan/Star Edmonton As active fire seasons become more common, Flannigan said we may become more accustomed to these evacuations but more surprised by how our planet reacts to its hotter climate. We can’t fully predict how climate change will play out.

“Overall, we're conducting unknown experiments on our planet,” Flannigan said.

“It's only going to get crazier in the future.”