It was the summer of 2003—my fourth in Whistler—when I realized coastal weather wasn’t going to be as benign as I’d envisioned. That year would become infamous for its catastrophic rains, flooding, and deep-freezes, but it was the wildfires preceding these that most British Columbians remember. At the time (now looked upon as the good ol’ wildfire days), 2003 was the most terrifying fire season in memory and the most expensive natural disaster in B.C. history. Little did we know what another decade would bring.
Prior to that summer, the southern tier of the province had suffered its driest three-year period on record. The Fraser River peaked in early July at one of its lowest levels in 90 years, and stream flows at 10 to 20 per cent of normal pointed to serious groundwater deficiencies. According to an Environment Canada summary, “Hungry bears roamed suburbs; hordes of beetles munched on pine trees; salmon suffocated in lethally warm streams; worried utilities imported energy; and water-desperate ranchers culled herds.” So, when a large high-pressure area over the Pacific blocked weather fronts from the coast for most of the summer, the outcome was inevitable. In the Interior, temperatures “soared” (in that charming Weather Channel argot) to 40°C (remember when that was a novelty?) hovering above 30°C for 19 days in July and 20 in August (the normal for each at the time was 11). Both Kamloops and Kelowna recorded the driest three-months since records began in 1899. Forests were tinder-dry and all it took was some human carelessness with a cigarette (the Barriere fire north of Kamloops), a flash of dry lightning (the Okanagan Mountain firestorm), and some gusty winds to ignite two of the largest, most instantly out-of-control conflagrations in history. Few can forget the nighttime photos across Okanagan Lake of the fire bearing down on Kelowna.
That summer, almost 2,500 fires charred 2,650 square kilometres—11 times the average for the previous decade. At their height, 7,600 civilians and nearly 2,000 military fought them; more than 50,000 were evacuated and 334 homes burned, prompting the Insurance Bureau of Canada to label the $250-million price tag the single largest loss in the country’s history (a record that would quickly topple). Not including timber losses, the cost to B.C. of fighting the fires approached half a billion dollars; next door, Glacier, Banff, Jasper and Kootenay National parks all burned bigtime.
We woke to the threat of wildfires in 2003, but didn’t learn many lessons. Whistler’s own 2009 fire on Blackcomb’s Crystal Ridge hustled the community into a FireSmart mindset—but we all kept up our support of fossil fuels and consume at typical North American levels, drawing no direct line between those activities and future apocalypse. Then came 2017.
That summer, a total of 12,161 square kilometres (five times greater than 2003) burned, the largest ever recorded and 1.3 per cent of B.C.’s total area. This dubious record was immediately broken in 2018. Although six of B.C.’s 10 worst fire seasons have occurred since 2010, the 2017 season remains notable for the largest number of evacuees (65,000), as well as B.C.’s largest single blaze ever—the Plateau fire near Williams Lake. More importantly, research finally made clear that human-caused climate change played a significant role. And so here we are, in 2021, with Lytton shattering Canada’s (and Las Vegas’) heat record three days in a row before evaporating in a wildfire. Clearly, we’re in what The Tyee journalist Ed Struzik rightly labels a “runaway fire age.”
Struzik charts a litany that has supercharged the fire situation since 2003: a century of fire suppression that changed forests from fire-resistant to fire-vulnerable; the draining of wetlands that can slow fires; the increasing popularity of rural properties among fire-dumb city-dwellers; lack of capacity of small communities to fire-proof; and, of course, climate change, with its skyrocketing temperatures, precipitation shifts, and increased lightning (2020 was the second hottest year on record; the top seven have all occurred since 2014), driving the kinds of phenomena—firestorms, fire tornados, lightning-producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds—that have made today’s wildfires larger, faster, deadlier and longer-lasting.
Take the 2017 Plateau fire. I had a chance to see it up close on a 2018 rafting trip. As the Chilcotin River braided through a valley near Alexis Creek, vegetated islands abounded with birds—squadrons of white pelicans, flocks of ducks, sandhill cranes and eagles that circled our flotilla expectantly, certain we were fishermen who’d leave scraps in our wake. Then, with a suddenness that only river travel can bring, the birds disappeared and the fire lines of 2017, visible for days on the horizon, descended in a monochrome of ash and charred trunks that had toppled, exploded and incinerated into a disquieting jumble over ground rendered bare when the soil itself burned off. The devastation was mind-boggling, more so considering the massive amounts of sequestered carbon that had vanished back into the atmosphere in a geologic instant to add to our current climate woes. And then there was the impact on wildlife, and the loss from nature’s larder it represented to First Nations.
As an example of how drastically wildfires can shrink biodiversity, the 2019/20 Aussie bushfires killed or displaced nearly 3 billion animals, a number that only includes those large enough to count and make estimates—2.46 billion reptiles, 143 million mammals, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs—while invertebrate losses are likely in the trillions. Fires that consumed the Amazon in 2019 killed an estimated 2.3 million animals, including species like jaguars that were already endangered. There’s also a biohazard aspect: microbes and fungal spores can survive in wildfire smoke. According to the CDC, as more wildfires plague California and Arizona, incidences of valley fever, a rare and potentially deadly fungal infection, have risen six-fold from 1998 to 2018, with firefighters especially vulnerable, adding to the simpler risk of inhaling the particulate matter of smoke.
We’re in a runaway fire age to be sure. But where are we running to?
Leslie Anthony is a science/environment writer and author who holds a doctorate in connecting the dots.
