Massive Canadian wildfires test foreign reinforcements
Contingent from France in awe of vast landscape
‘If anybody in New York is wondering why there’s smoke there, it’s because the fires here are unstoppable.’
OBEDJIWAN, Canada — An out-of-control fire was advancing rapidly toward a logging road on Tuesday afternoon, tearing through Canada’s immense — and highly flammable — boreal forest with a force and intensity bewildering to a team of French firefighters.
Surrounded by thick smoke, a handful of them headed into the forest to search for water. A veteran knelt down and used his right finger to sketch a plan on the gravel road, pressing to attack
FABRICE MOSSÉ, commander of French firefighters assisting Canadian firefighters and soldiers in Quebec
the fire head-on.
But the commander was not convinced. The fire, he said, was of an immensity unimaginable in France. The conifers of a combustibility they had never encountered. Trying to douse this tiny patch would be “pointless.”
“We’re not back home,” said the commander, Fabrice Mossé, as a plume of fire shot up from a cluster of trees nearby, and as an increasingly nervous Canadian logging supervisor who had led the French to the spot said: “The fire’s going to be here any minute. We can chat, but let’s do it 20 kilometers away.”
Back at the base, Mossé said, “If anybody in New York is wondering why there’s smoke there, it’s because the fires here are unstoppable.”
“Unstoppable,” he repeated. A group of 109 French firefighters arrived in northern Quebec earlier this month to assist nearly 1,000 Canadian firefighters and soldiers, the first foreign reinforcements to help the province tackle the extraordinary outbreak of forest fires that sent smoke to New York and other cities across North America, forcing millions indoors because of hazardous air quality.
More than 400 wildfires have burned all across Canada. But much of the smoke over New York drifted from Quebec, a province unaccustomed to so many enormous fires.
The experience of the French contingent illustrates the challenges of fighting wildfires in Canada as climate change increases the dangers to its boreal forests, the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem and biggest terrestrial carbon vault.
Used to aggressively and quickly attacking much smaller wildfires in France, the French firefighters must adapt to a landspace whose scale has left them in awe: Quebec, a province three times the size of France, is ravaged by fires sometimes a hundred times as large as what they are used to confronting.
There was a “fatalism” in fighting fires in Canada, said one French commander: Fighting them often meant letting them burn, especially in thinly populated areas, and trying to stop them from spreading.
“For us, it’s absolutely impossible to let fires burn,” said General Eric Flores, the leader of the French contingent who is from the Hérault department in southern France, a region with regular wildfires. “In my department, there isn’t a fire that isn’t within 10 kilometers of houses and people. If I let it burn, it will become uncontrollable. That’s why we attack fires very rapidly.”
Initially deployed to three areas in northern Quebec, the French converged last week on an area called Obedjiwan — a hot spot about 400 miles north of Montreal by road.
The battle for Obedjiwan was taking place in a typical patch of Canadian boreal forest: It was inhabited by a single community of about 2,000 members of the Atikamekw First Nations in the reserve of Obedjiwan.
Gravel and dirt roads carved out by a Quebec logging company, Barrette-Chapais, crisscross the vast area surrounding Obedjiwan, which is also home to the Indigenous community’s sprawling ancestral hunting grounds.
Until the French arrived, several immense fires north of Obedjiwan had been left alone as Quebec’s wildfire agency focused its efforts on the province’s inhabited areas, especially the largest city, Chibougamau. As fires reached within 13 miles of Obedijwan, hundreds of older residents, children, and others were evacuated to the nearest city, four hours away by road.
Surveying the area by helicopter, Flores saw that the fire closest to Obedjiwan was contained, but two larger fires north were still raging out of control. Smoke blanketed the forest, and hundreds of fire clusters could be seen burning below.
Vast stretches had been incinerated, some just next to still verdant areas. Isolated cabins, belonging to residents of Obedijwan, could be spotted, some burned down, others still intact but very near the flames. No wildfire-related deaths have been reported in Quebec, with damage limited mostly to rural cabins and cottages.
Unable to directly confront fires as they would back home, the French adopted a defensive posture by suppressing embers in charred areas next to intact ones, in consultation with their liaison to the Quebec wildfire agency, Louis Villeneuve, a veteran of more than two decades.
“It’s the immensity of the boreal forest, the immensity of Canada, and the boreal forest is a fuel,” Villeneuve said.
Conifers contain high levels of sap, which burns quickly and acts as an accelerant for fastmoving wildfires, shooting flames high in the air that can cross roads and other barriers.
Not far from their base — a logging camp that Flores had fortified by quickly cutting down trees along its perimeter — dozens of French firefighters traveled in pickups deep into the forest near a lake. A single cabin, belonging to a member of the Obedjiwan community, stood on its edge, untouched for now.
A helicopter transported small teams deeper still into the forest, dropping them off at hotpoints. There, the French tried to extinguish fires simmering below the surface, dousing the ground with water that they pumped from nearby lakes and streams, in an effort to prevent fires from reigniting and spreading to untouched areas.
It was a long game — fending off fires that could come back to life in the coming summer heat.
“We’re not used to going to areas that already burned,” said Jérôme Schmitt, 37, a French firefighter waiting for the helicopter to pick up his team. “We usually go fight blazes, but we’re adapting.”