BURN NOTICE

What's really fuelling the wildfire crisis?

- ELIZABETH KOLBERT

The provincial government of Alberta defines a “wildfire of note” as a blaze that could “pose a threat to public safety, communities or critical infrastructure.” Last year, Alberta’s first wildfire of note broke out unusually early, on April 30th, near the tiny town of Entwistle, about sixty-five miles west of Edmonton. A second wildfire of note was recorded that same day, in the town of Evansburg. Four days later, an astonishing seventy-two wildfires were burning, and three days after that the number had grown to a hundred and nine. Some thirty thousand people had to be evacuated, and Alberta’s premier declared a state of emergency. “It’s been an unusual year,” Christie Tucker, an official from the province’s wildfire information unit, observed at the end of the week.

The unusual soon became the unheard- of. Owing to a combination of low winter snowfall and abnormally high spring temperatures, many parts of Canada, including the Maritime Provinces, were just a cigarette butt away from incineration. On May 28th, with flames bearing down on Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, some eighteen thousand people were told to evacuate. “Basically, all hell is breaking loose,” a fire chief in Halifax, Rob Hebb, said. Meanwhile, the largest fire ever recorded in Nova Scotia—the Barrington Lake fire—was burning toward the city’s southwest.

The fires kept hopscotching across the country. Before the Barrington Lake fire had been contained, a new monster, the Donnie Creek f ire, emerged in British Columbia. On June 18th, after scorching more than two thousand square miles, Donnie Creek became British Columbia’s largest recorded blaze.