By Richard Cole
Fire Weather, by John Vaillant, was among the New York Times 10 Best Books for 2023 and was a National Book Award finalist. While not an easy read, it is a gripping page-turner and its accolades well-deserved. Fire Weather examines the utter devastation wrought by a massive climate-fueled wildfire that in 2016 destroyed most of the city of Fort McMurray in the province of Alberta, Canada.
Vaillant takes the reader through the history of colonization of Western Canada, from pelt trade to the development of the oil industry. Fort McMurray arose solely around the extraction and refinement of bitumen found within the oil sands. Bitumen forms the basis for a number of petroleum products, a sizable amount of which are imported to the United States. He provides a richly detailed deep dive into the role fire has played in human civilization. He also looks at fire behavior as though it were a living, breathing being–particularly as it pertains to wildfires, which are not uncommon in the boreal forest. Generally speaking, they go unnoticed. That is until they aren’t.
In the spring of 2016, conditions were exceptionally favorable for significant wildfire activity: well above-average temperatures combined with extremely dry vegetation, high winds and low humidity. A small fire not far from the city limits quickly grew into a raging inferno that would soon flank and overtake the city, rendering neighborhood after neighborhood unrecognizable. The fire was so intense that it created its own weather, generating a massive pyrocumulonimbus cloud and a rare fire tornado. It’s as if Vaillant were describing the horrid scenario of a low-yield nuclear blast. In some sense, it is an easy comparison, given the immense power of this force not of nature, but of man. This is a catastrophe born of the explosive growth of the fossil fuel industry with all its deleterious effects. Despite their valiant efforts to contain the massive blaze, firefighters became overwhelmed, and the focus shifted to saving the lives of some 88,000 desperate souls who were forced to flee in a matter of hours. Through the tireless efforts of first responders, and some luck, there was no loss of (human) life. The fire was not fully extinguished until August 2017.
Vaillant poignantly makes the case for how the fossil fuel industry is complicit in the ever-increasing threats from the climate crisis, boldly demonstrated in one of the continent’s worst wildfires. (Underscoring his point are the many record-setting costly and deadly wildfires in North America and beyond in recent years). He goes on to articulate all manner of efforts to change the dynamic as we face an ever-warming world. Powerful and timely, this is investigative literature at its finest.