Fire posting

Adam's Notes for May 18, 2024

The Forest Fire by Piero di Cosimo

I want to thank everyone who reached out last week asking if I was safe from the nearby forest fire. Thank you, I really do mean that.

The fire is still burning just outside of town, still just under 20,000 hectares. Tuesday, May 14, was the day that it was most worrying. The wind shifted and started blowing the fire towards the town, and the fire grew from 6500 hectares on the 12th to almost 20,000 hectares over the course of the day. About 6,000 people living in neighbourhoods at the edge of town were told to evacuate, these being the same neighbourhoods that burned first in 2016.

Everything outside took on that sepia tone that tells you things are getting serious. I was here in 2016 when a huge chunk of the town burned and 70,000 people had only a few hours to get out. I want to write about that sometime. It was while I was evacuated that I started journalling again, so I have a lot of notes from the time. But I also have a lot of ambivalent feelings about living here, in a town propped up by an industry that really should be shut down, and that bears responsibility for the conditions that lead to these new, massive fires. Maybe I will write about it, eventually, but I’m not ready yet.

Anyway, back to Tuesday: we had the sepia tone, but the actual sky would keep shifting from an ominous daytime dark back to bright blue, and I don’t think the daytime temperature even got up to 20C (it was much hotter in 2016). So I had sort of a gut feeling it wasn’t going to be as bad. Still though, I packed a bag and did a lot of pacing.

My neighbourhood had a weird mix of being both busy and quiet: there weren’t many cars on the road and the normal day-to-day noises were absent, but a lot of folks were out on their lawn or in their driveways, either packing their car or looking at the sky and talking to each other, trying to judge if it was time to go. I stayed put, and it turned out to be the right choice: there’s only one highway out of here¹, and the police blocked access to it to allow neighbourhoods under an evacuation order to get out first. So a lot of people who thought the smart thing was to leave town early really just sat in traffic for two or three hours.

The evacuated neighbourhoods didn’t burn, and people even got to go home early. I heard that they were asked to leave not because the fire was as close as it was last time, but so that firefighters could drop flame retardant around the perimeter of their neighbourhoods without killing people or pets. There’s a lot more firefighting technology now too, as town-destroying fire seasons become a regular occurrence in Western Canada. Three of our town’s helicopters are now equipped with nightvision equipment, so they don’t have to stop at sundown, and there’s this big heavy duty sprinkler system I keep hearing about but haven’t seen yet, that gets deployed around critical areas. In his book Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, John Vaillant writes about a sort of makeshift sprinkler system that was on hand but (I think) not actually deployed in 2016. Now it seems they’re a bit more common, things that fire departments and governments know to purchase beforehand. (Another memory from 2016: leaving town the next morning, seeing some guy up on his roof with a garden hose and sprinkler, then just a few minutes down the road driving past a gas station and hotel both still burning hot after going up in flames the night before).

Aside from Tuesday, there’s was only one other worrying moment. At one point the government (I assume municipal, but it might’ve been the province) sensibly banned ATVs and offroad vehicles (sparks from their exhausts cause a lot of wildfires) but being freedom-loving conservatives, they made sure the ban was announced in the morning but didn’t go into effect until 2pm. So of course at around noon there was a new fire on an ATV trail on the northside of town, close to homes, and the wind that was blowing the big fire away from us was now blowing the small fire towards some densely populated neighbourhoods. That fire was brought under control quickly, but it drew resources away from the bigger fire, and it was only extinguished sometime today or last night.

Otherwise, the wind has mostly been cooperative, and there’s been a lot of rain, starting I think on Thursday night and continuing into the weekend. Unseasonable, but definitely welcome. Another bit of luck, if you want to call it that: because the fire is in an area that’s already burned, it’s not a crown fire, reach to the tops of trees. There’s still a lot of summer left, of course, but my sense is that locally the worst of it is over.

Photo of dark skies I took around one in the afternoon on May 14

Some interesting resources

Alberta Wildfire Dashboard | Wildfire smoke forecast for the US and Canada | NASA heat map of North America |

Thanks for reading Adam’s Notes. I’ll be back with this month’s Pepys post this week or next.

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1. Well, you can also take the highway north, but the only thing north of town is oilsands stuff. In 2016 I wasn’t able to make it south before forced the closure of the highway going south, ended up spending the night in a pickup truck in an industrial park, listening to an early episode of Chapo Trap House.