Wildfire Tales of Two Countries

"Why are they [the U.S.] getting it and we [Canada] are not? It's because of the weather they're getting. The warmer it gets, the longer the fire season."

"Absolutely it [COVID-19] had an impact [on wildfire events in Canada]. There were fewer people out and about working or recreating [sic] in the woods, so the number of caused fires was way down this year ... Forest closures, quad bans, they work, they really work."

Mike Flannigan, professor, department of renewable resources, University of Alberta

"Emergency and social resources at the provincial and municipal levels are already taxed by the COVID-10 response, we don't need the added burden of a human-caused wildfire this year", said Devin Dreeshen, Alberta's minister of Agriculture and Forestry when bans on off-highway vehicles were announced during the COVID lockdowns. And those bans were effective in helping to reduce the human element in accidental wildfire starts.

A firefighter shoots an incendiary device during a back burn to help control the Dolan fire at Limekiln State Park in Big Sur, California, September 11

And now, though the Vancouver and parts of southern B.C. areas' air quality hasn't been impacted by wildfires in British Columbia this year thanks mostly to the unusual rain events being experienced this summer, air quality has been significantly reduced in any event, as a result of winds blowing smoke from the epic fires burning in Washington and Oregon states. Western Canada has seen fewer wildfires than is usual this year, while the United States is facing an unprecedented number of huge, uncontrollably destructive wildfires.

 

Last year by this time, 850,000 hectares was burned in Alberta by 950 wildfires as compared to this year when 614 wildfires burned through 1,450 hectares, while in British Columbia 610 fires burned around 13,000 hectares as opposed to 2018 when 2,116 wildfires ripped across the province burning over 1.3 million hectares. And now, in California alone, seven dozen fires are burning, resulting in a record-breaking 2.2 million acres scorched, 2,000 percent steeper than the 118,000 acres burned this time last year.

 

Neighborhoods in Monrovia, California, are enshrouded in smoke from the Bobcat Fire on Sunday

 Fires are raging across Oregon, Nevada, Washington and Utah, damaging homes, leaving millions of people exposed to a smoky haze. Oregon Governor Kate Brown at a news conference stated grimly: "This will not be a one-time event", but a harbinger of things to come, attributing the severity of the fires, the drought conditions enabling the fires and the severe electrical storms sparking them, all symbolic of climate change.

Roughly a half million people in Oregon, representing two percent of the population in the state, were given orders to evacuate on Friday. Oregon's largest city, Portland, saw residents warned to be prepared to leave as wind-driven wildfires scorched the West Coast states, causing at least two dozen deaths. An area close to the size of the state of New Jersey has been burned to date across the U.S. West. California, Oregon and Washington state are experiencing the absolute worst air quality levels in the world.

A community some 40 km south of downtown Portland, Molalla, became a ghost town covered in ash once its 9,000 residents were urgently evacuated, with 30 people refusing to leave the logging town on the front line of a huge evacuation zone stretching within 4.8 km of downtown Portland, county police setting a 10 p.m. curfew to deter "possible increased criminal activity". In the state, red "GO!" warnings targeted ten percent of the population to leave their homes immediately.

Hundreds of thousands of residents were signalled by the yellow "BE SET" warning; to leave at a moment's notice, while others were given the green "BE READY" alert. Southeast of Portland, towns were left to the mercy of strong winds when two of the largest wildfires in the state merged into a single beast of a wildfire. Firefighters launched drones once winds dropped on Friday, into a deep yellow smog to determine how close the flames were. "We don't know where the fire is", Molalla Fire Department Lieut.Mike Penunri said.

 

Burned-out residential subdivisions and trailer parks stretched miles along Highway 99 south of Medford in southern Oregon through Pheonix and Talent, the worse hit areas, with blazes leaping from wildfires burning through scrub and forest into suburban firestorms, flames racing from house to house. The three thousand firefighting personnel assigned to Oregon Department of Forestry fire chief Doug Grafe led him to assess a need of twice that number to maintain a hold on the three dozen major blazes he's battling. 

 

The Bobcat Fire burns in Angeles national forest north of Monrovia, California on Friday, September 11

In California, over 68,000 people where the largest fire in state history has burned over 299,470 hectares in the Mendocino National Forest were under evacuation orders. "We had four hours to pack up our pets and a few medications and things like that", retiree John Maylone explained, when he was forced to leave three of his 30 cats behind, fleeing the massive Creek Fire. An arson investigation has been opened by police into the Oregon fire which destroyed most of Phoenix and Talent.

 

Multiple communities in the Cascades were destroyed, while areas of coastal rainforest normally wildfire-spared have been torched. The farming town of Malden in eastern Washington state was destroyed. Americans have taken to building their houses in forests as second seasonal homes. Others as permanent dwellings resulting from unaffordable prices in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. 

 

Smoke from wildfires fills the sky over Pasadena, California, on Saturday.