FIGHTING FIRE
New book pulls the alarm on future destructive firestorms
In November of 2016, author Edward Struzik took a trip to the top of Sulphur Mountain in Banff National Park with two wildfire specialists, not to admire the spectacular view but to imagine the scene below if a massive wildfire like the one that hit Fort McMurray tore through the Banff town site.
This was not wild conjecture but a sobering possibility for those who study forest fires.
According to the experts, places considered particularly vulnerable include Timmins, Ont., Whistler, and Libby, Mont. And then there’s Banff.
“If Banff burned, I realized, the world would pay attention because so many people worldwide have been there at one time or have dreamed about going,” writes Struzik in Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future.
Struzik is a nationally acclaimed author of numerous books on the environment and the recipient of more than 30 awards for his writing. (Full disclosure — he is a former Journal reporter and I still miss his writing in our pages).
“The theoretical Banff fire begins on a dry, hot day in late spring or summer when there are 25,000 tourists in and around the town of 9,000,” is how Struzik visualizes the beginning of the end from his eagle’s perch.
“Down below on the wild west side of Sulphur, a fire ignites in a stand of old-growth coniferous forest that hasn’t burned since the last big wildfire raced through this part of Banff in 1889.”
Struzik imagines the fire racing up the mountainside from the parking lot in 20 minutes, trapping doomed tourists inside the interpretive centre as “burning embers come raining down on the town below.”
Firestorm reads at times like an exhilarating novel but it is neither flippant nor alarmist.
Struzik is a well-travelled author who has written extensively on the realities of global warming but this is not another apocalyptic climate change book.
It is not a screed or a hectoring lecture telling us to park our cars and walk to work in sandals handmade from hemp. Greenpeace will not be dangling giant copies of Firestorm from Edmonton’s High Level Bridge.
The book is a clear-eyed vision, expertly and compellingly told, of what’s ahead as the climate warms, whether you think that trend is caused by man or nature.
Struzik skilfully delves into the Fort McMurray fire with a storyteller’s eye for detail, but his scope is worldwide as he lays out some disturbing facts about potential firestorms that will eject more than smoke into the air.
Struzik uses a trip to Ukraine in 2016 with a Canadian physician involved with the Chernobyl Children’s Project to reference reports that wildfires in the past decade have re-released some of radioactive material from the 1986 nuclear meltdown into the atmosphere.
Closer to home, he visits the area south of the B.C.-Montana border near Libby that has its own exclusion zone marked by “Keep Out” signs.
The town is well-known in local lore for almost being destroyed by a massive fire in 1910 dubbed the “Big Burn.”
A fire today would be even more dangerous because of what’s in the exclusion zone that wasn’t there a century ago: asbestos.
“In addition to the heat, smoke, ash and burning embers that will inevitably be released in this steep and rugged landscape, this fire will spew out needlelike, cancer-causing asbestos fibres, an unwanted, unintended by-product from asbestos mines that operated in that area from around 1923 to 1990.”
Asbestos, of course, is fire resistant. It won’t be burned in a wildfire. The carcinogen fibres will simply be spread far and wide.
Montana fire officials are so convinced of a future fire in the area they’ve already given it an official label: Operable Unit 3.
And many firefighters have already said they have no intention of helping fight it.
As Struzik points out, there have been many massive firestorms over the years. The difference is because of a warming climate there will be more and bigger firestorms in the future.
Just look at northern California, hit by deadly wildfires this month that have killed more than 30 people.
With these disasters, including the Fort McMurray inferno, nature seems to be pulling the fire alarm.
When “The Beast” hit the city in 2016, some misguided, hard-hearted or just plain cruel environmentalists blamed the oilsands city for its own climate change misfortune.
You won’t find a glimmer of malice in Struzik’s book. By pointing to disastrous fires in the past, he is laying a path forward. He is not laying blame.
“I did not want to make this a book about climate change because there’s a lot more to wildfire outside of the fact that the world is heating up,” said Struzik in an email interview while on a book tour.
“By now, I think most people, rightly or wrongly, have made their minds up about climate change. My thought was this: even if we tackled climate change now in an aggressive way, we would be facing serious wildfire challenges for decades to come.”
Struzik is a realist and a pragmatist. Even though he is warning us that “wildfires like the one in Fort McMurray will come sooner rather than later and will come much more often,” he is also an optimist.
“Fires are going to burn bigger, hotter, faster and more often,” he said in the interview. “But it’s not the end of the world if we prepare ourselves for it. Wildfire scientists can chart out a roadmap to the future. Planners can develop better building codes for forested communities. FireSmart programs can make these communities more resilient to fire. Firefighters can be given more sophisticated tools to fight fire. There’s an awful lot that can be done to prevent Slave Lake and Fort McMurray-like fire events from recurring. We saw that happen in Waterton this summer. Parks Canada took no chances by evacuating people early.”
Firestorm is an exhaustively researched and expertly crafted work of non-fiction but soon after picking it up you’ll be engrossed in what is ultimately a fascinating page-turner.