Rain will be needed to slay this dragon
I n 2003, when a wildfire caused by lightning menaced the cottages of Weyakwin Lake, Sask., the crews fighting the blaze called it the Dragon Fire, in recognition of its fast fury.
Years before, in 1987, when one of the world’s largest wildfires engulfed the banks of the Amur River, between Russia and China, it became known as the Black Dragon Fire. As one firefighter told Harrison E. Salisbury, who wrote a book on it: “I guess you could say it sounded like the roar of a dragon.”
“Once started, the fire was king,” he wrote.
More than other natural calamities, wildfires conjure mythical, storybook images. Gifford Pinchot, for example, a pioneer in American forestry, wrote of his mission to confront the “dragon Devastation in his own home cave.”
Earthquakes have power, avalanches have speed, thunderstorms have grandeur, but only wildfires seem alive. They breathe, creating their own wind, sucking in cold air from all around and funnelling a column of hot air up, in this case, into the stratosphere, where NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a picture of a massive plume of smoke. On the ground they dart and weave, shifting course capriciously as they seek and devour nourishment, almost as if following private impulses and appetites.
As it prompted the largest evacuation in Alberta’s history, starting Tuesday, the Fort McMurray fire was being called nasty and dirty, mundane adjectives to describe a threatening nuisance. But as it devastated the city and grew Friday to 100,000 hectares, with some parts so intense they spawned lightning clouds, the metaphors and names officials used for the fire started to become supernatural, drawing on mankind’s shared experience with terror of nature, and the urge to see a face in the flames.
Mayor Melissa Blake called it a “multi-headed monster,” evoking images of the mythical Cerberus, who guards the gates of hell, preventing those inside from fleeing, or the fearsome nine-headed Hydra, which would grow two new heads each time one was cut off.
“We’re still here, we’re still battling,” said Darby Allen, the regional fire chief and the human face of the resistance. “The beast is still up. It’s surrounding the city, and we’re here doing our very best for you.”
Helped along by high winds and hot, dry air, that beast has destroyed more real estate in Fort McMurray than officials can currently measure, including entire neighbourhoods. It attacked from the southwest, reaching north and east as if to embrace the city, crossing the so-called wildland urban interface at many points, moving as fast as city traffic.
“Mother Nature has con- spired against us on multiple fronts,” Daryl Black, a member of the emergency command team in Fort McMurray told The New York Times on Wednesday.
Officials on Friday called the fire an “extreme wildfire event” and said they expect to see it continue in the days ahead, with no rain immediately forecast. Two dozen water bombers, some carrying as much as 1,000 gallons, are doing what they can to guide and thwart the fire’s progress.
Some have compared them to spitting on a campfire.
“Let me be clear: air tankers are not going to stop this fire,” Chad Morrison of Alberta Forestry told a briefing in Edmonton on Thursday. “It is going to continue to push through these dry conditions until we actually get some significant rain to help us. I expect this fire to continue to grow over the next number of days.”
But as futile as it can seem in the face of a towering inferno, water-bombing “has a target and a usefulness, for sure,” said Roger Collet, a wildfire prevention officer with Natural Resources in New Brunswick. “It’s deceiving how small that bucket is under it, but if you’re trying to stop a fire that’s moving in toward the airport, for instance, and you’ve got some hot spots that are starting to flare up it’s quite effective in trying to knock down some of those little flare-ups.”
“You are trying to build a barrier that the fire can’t burn through,” said David Martell, a professor in the forestry department at the University of Toronto. “One way is to put people on the ground with axes and shovels to dig a trench, and the other is to drop fire retardant.”
As the beast lurches on, however, and the fire grows in many directions at once, it becomes harder to tell where that barrier might hold. As Fort McMurray resident Cheyenne Nouar told Postmedia, the fire “has come through Fort McMurray and it’s coming to where we’re going, it’s almost like it’s following us. It’s definitely a monster.”