Fire Weather

Watching the news coverage this past week of the horrific fires in Los Angeles, I've been thinking more and more about John Valliant's Fire Weather, one of the most important and frightening nonfiction books I've ever read.

Making a Monster

"This is not planet Earth as we found it. This is a new place—a fire planet we have made."

Fire Weather chronicles the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, but first it sets the scene by delving into the geology of the Alberta oil sands and the history of our relationship with fire before laying out all the reasons they're becoming more and more disastrous and unpredictable.

It is equal parts history lesson, edge of your seat action drama, scientific case study and dire warning about the modern perils of fire in a world literally build on petroleum.

The author describes how wildfires have been a natural component of ecosystems like the boreal forest throughout our planet's history, playing an important role in its cycles of growth and renewal. But human activities like the oil and gas industry, and our use of petroleum products in nearly every aspect of the built environment, from roads to building materials and nearly everything that goes into our homes and bodies, have made modern fires an existential threat.

Flammability

"The city and the surrounding landscape had become something akin to a fire planet—not a biome but a “pyrome” whose purpose was not to support life but to enable combustion."

For me, the most astonishing and chilling revelations in the book are about how fires spread from forests to residential areas and why they’re so much harder to contain now than in the past. Fires destroyed cities like Chicago and San Fransisco in the previous century, but what we’re seeing now is different by orders of magnitude. The destruction of entire cities has never been so fast or so total.

In the modern world, construction is almost entirely an oil-based endeavor. Houses built a century ago used fibers like raw lumber, wool, cotton and brick. Now, they are mass manufactured with much more combustible materials containing petroleum, which burn much hotter and faster.

Annihilation in 3:40

The book describes a study conducted by Underwriters Laboratories comparing the flammability of modern homes built with contemporary materials and furnishings, and the other replicating a home from a century ago with period-appropriate materials. They ignited both homes under test conditions to observe how they burned.

The modern home ignited faster and burned much more intensely, reaching flashover—the stage where everything in the room simultaneously ignites—in approximately three minutes and 40 seconds, whereas the room with natural furnishings took over 29 minutes to reach the same point.

You can watch the video of the experiment here.

When modern homes burn, they also release intense heat and toxic smoke, causing fires to spread far more rapidly to nearby homes.

The embers from those burning homes ignite cars, asphalt roads and all those cheap consumer products like lawn furniture, toys and sporting goods made of plastic, polyeurethane and other synthetic materials. Carried by superheated winds, they can create a terrifying phenomenon that is becoming a common feature modern disasters; the fire tornado.

Fire Planet

"Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon."

With fierce eloquence and deep empathy for his human subjects, Valliant weaves in the personal stories of several residents of Fort McMurray, narrating their harrowing escapes in scenes of pure horror that I vividly remember seeing on the news in 2016.

Search YouTube and you'll find dozens of videos posted by residents. A single freeway choked with black smoke and a rain of burning embers, hillsides ablaze with towering columns of flame on either side as cars and trucks move in harrowing slow motion through an alien landscape transformed by fire.

The Fort McMurray fire forced the evacuation of more than 88,000 residents and destroyed 2,400 homes and buildings. Miraculously, no one was killed.

Maui on Fire

In August 2023, just a few months after the publication of Fire Weather, Maui was devastated by fires that raged out of control for days, resulting in 102 fatalities and the destruction of nearly 3,000 structures in Lahaina. 

Both fires were exacerbated by similar conditions. In Fort McMurray, above-average temperatures for early May and dry forest underbrush combined to create a tinderbox situation. Similarly, Maui in August was in a drought, and hurricane force winds spread the fire faster than the city's emergency services could react.

Despite the slow reaction in Fort McMurray and the fact that there were only two main highways leading out of the city, the evacuation was orderly and well managed. In Maui, failed communication networks and a lack of emergency sirens contributed to the tragic casualty rate.

Battle: Los Angeles

As I'm writing this on Saturday morning, cataclysmic fires are still raging across Los Angeles. The scenes are nothing short of apocalyptic, with multiple fires still blanketing the hills around the city and entire neighborhoods flattened as if by an atomic bomb.

So far, more than 180,000 people have been evacuated. There are 11 confirmed deaths, but that number is almost certain to rise in the coming days. More than 10,000 structures have been destroyed.

Again, incredibly strong winds, dry conditions and unseasonable temperatures spread of the fires so quickly they became impossible to control, leading to almost unimaginable destruction.

Fire Seasons

It seems like every year now, smoke from wildfires in Canada and California are carried across the continent, resulting in unearthly dark orange skies and air quality advisories as far east as New York and as far south as Texas.

In the years since Fort McMurray, "fire season" has become a common term to describe those increasingly hazardous summer months. This year, it's started in January.

"The current moment is the greatest challenge humanity has faced since we (almost) mastered fire. This time, it is not fire we have to master, but ourselves. If we fail this test, there will be another one, and another after that, but each time the stakes will be higher and the price of failure steeper."

[All quotes are from Fire Weather by John Valliant. All images courtesy of Dall-E.]

Artist Interview

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