Book: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
Basic Information :
Synopsis :
Characters :
Expectations :
Thoughts :
Evaluation :
Book Group :
New Words :
Book References :
Good Quotes :
Table of Contents :
References
Basic Information: Author: John Vaillant
Edition: epub on Libby from the Fresno County Library
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9781524732851 (ISBN10: 1524732850)
Start Date: December 3, 2023
Read Date: February 27, 2024
432 pages
Genre: History, Science, Fire
Language Warning: Low
Rated Overall: 3½ out of 5
History: 4 out of 5
Synopsis:
The
book is divided into three parts: The Fire, how Climate has changed
Fire, and what he calls The Reckoning. The main emphasis is the 2016
Fort McMurray Fire. He talks about the intensity of the fire and how
the firefighters were not ready to face this intensity.
But
then he goes on and talks about how fires are getting more intense
and the driving force behind it: the rise in earth’s temperatures.
This is caused by the rising CO2
content in the atmosphere. He blames the petroleum companies for
this.
Cast of Characters:
-
Shandra
Linder-worked for Syncrude
-
Melissa
Blake-May of Fort McMurray
-
Bernie
Schmitte-51 years old, regional fire manager
-
Darby
Allen-59 years old, fire chief of Fort McMurray
-
Ryan
Couts-firefighter at Slave Lake.
-
John
Knoxs-a radio station program manager.
-
Reid
Fiest-journalist from another city
-
Chris
Vandenbreekel-radio journalist, who had knowledge of wildfire
-
Paul
Ayearst-resident, worked in the mine
-
Troy
Palmer-chief of Hall 1, student of military history
-
Lucas
Welch-firefighter for Suncor
-
Wayne
McGrath-resident of Abasand Heights
-
Mark
Stephenson-Captain, Fort McMurray
-
Ronnie
Lukan-volunteer firefighter from Slave Lake, heavy equipment operator
by day
-
Steve
Bustillos-retired police detective in Redding.
Places:
-
Athabasca
River.
-
Fort
McMurray
Expectations:
-
Recommendation:
NPR
-
When:
November 17, 2023
-
Date
Became Aware of Book: November 17, 2023
-
Why
do I want to read this book: Talked about it on NPR and with my
volunteering in a fire lookout, it would seem a natural tie in.
-
What
do I think I will get out of it? More background on what happens in a
really big fire.
Thoughts:
Part
One: Origin Stories
Prologue
Sets
the stage to talk about the Fort
McMurray Fire
which
started in May
2016.
It would be a big fire and the most destructive in Canadian history.
But there was not one death associated with the fire. The chapter
also lays the groundwork to talk about changes in weather and
climate.
Chapter
1
Talks
about how expansive Canada is, particularly as you travel north. He
notes trees do not get big because they burn often-it is a feature,
not a flaw. Chinchaga
Fire
of 1950, the largest fire in North America.
Then
talks about Fort McMurray. A mining city of 90,000 to 140,000 getting
petroleum out of rock.
A
couple of fires were burning. The residents were watching them, but
not apprehensive. More of a party.
Chapter
2
Vaillant
goes through the role which bitumen/bituminous sand played at Fort
McMurray. Bitumen
is an immensely viscous constituent of petroleum. Depending on its
exact composition it can be a sticky, black liquid or an apparently
solid mass that behaves as a liquid over very large time scales.
From Wikipedia.
It is asphalt but there were ways to bring out petroleum products
from it. Alberta, particularly Fort McMurray is rich in it. Even
people gainfully employed in those mines compare them to Mordor
Sebastião
Salgado,
Edward
Burtynsky,
or
J. M. W. Turner-painters
and photographers.
Fort
McMurray has extreme weather which causes equipment to malfunction or
ruin. So they need to be continually heated.
The
government helps to make this operation profitable. Alberta
has taken these liabilities into account and, in order for the
bitumen industry to be even remotely profitable, four conditions must
be met: conventional oil must be trading above $50 a barrel; the
natural resources needed to produce it (fresh water, natural gas, and
the boreal forest ecosystem) must be had for next to nothing; the
industry itself must be heavily subsidized; and exploration costs
must be nil. There is a fifth condition, exploited not just by the
bitumen industry but by the entire burning world: no consequences for
emissions
Chapter
3
Goes
through a history of bitumen. In Alberta, before bitumen, trapping
otters was the big trading item. …,
corporations and wildfires follow similar growth patterns
[as that of the Hudson Bay Company]
in that, once they reach a certain size, they are able to dictate
their own terms across a landscape—even if it destroys the very
ecosystem that enabled them to grow so powerful in the first place.
Vaillant
notes that at some point the State and company merge and you cannot
tell them apart. Even with high wages, debt among the bitumen workers
was high.
Before
the multinational giants and their armies of workers move in, the
visionaries must pave the way.
Here, Vaillant traces how the companies which mine the bitumen came
to be dominant in this area. Talks about a geological survey hitting
a pocket of gas which erupted. It was lit on fire and stayed lite for
21 years until it was capped.
Chapter
4
In
1967, the ability to mine bitumen in Fort McMurray big time was made
possible by the completion of a factory by Suncor.. But it would not
be profitable for decades.
What
is impressive to those who work there is the scar they are leaving on
the earth. A
lot of things are said to be “visible from space,” but not from
six thousand miles above Earth. At that distance,
Wages
were high-workers were scarce. But so was the social issues-fighting,
drugs, alcohol.
Chapter
5
Fires
start small and are dependent on three things: oxygen, fuel and heat.
It also needs a catalyst-something to start it. It
is not the tree or house that burns, but the gases those things emit.
Virtually
everything we have accomplished on our increasingly rapid journey of
differentiation from other apes, and from our own ancestors, can be
traced in direct relation to our ability to focus and concentrate
this fierce prosthetic energy—“heat” seems far too soft a term
for what it has wrought in us and in our world
We
think of fire as something which we cook by or warm ourselves with.
But if you consider each spark which a car engine makes is a fire and
multiply that out by the number of cylinders and cars on earth which
are running, the number of fires just from that is immense.
Chemists
call fire a rapid
oxidation event.
Oxygen is very reactive with almost everything.
Vaillant
thinks of homo sapiens as homo flagrams: burning man.
Part
Two: Fire Weather
Chapter
6
The
actual fire’s name was MWF-009 (McMurray Wildfire 009, the ninth
fire of the season in the region.
I
could not tell if Vaillant said too much about the fire. Where did it
start? How did it start? There is a June
16, 2016 article by the CBC which
talks about the suspensions that this is a human caused fire. It
talks about people who had been on the Horse River Trail System
between April 29 and May 5. It was first sighted on May 1st.
Wikipedia
gives
the coordinates of 56.665278, -111.383333. But these coordinates do
not jive with it being 9.3 miles away from Fort McMurray.
Talks
about the early days of the fire. How efforts were made to prevent it
from going in the direction of the city. Extreme fire conditions
were present-high temperatures and low humidity. And then there was
wind.
Emergency
was declared on May 2nd. While a press conference was being given,
the fire was called out of control.
Reminiscent
of the Slave
Lake Fire.
Those who fought this fire realized that those fighting the Fort
McMurray Fire would probably fail to contain it. The problem is that
as you are fighting the front of the fire, behind you embers are
falling, igniting new fires.
Talks
about ground fires, ladder fires, and crown fires. Gives definitions
of each. Also differences in fighting rural/forest fires and urban
fires.
Chapter
7
Highway
63 is the only way in or out of Fort McMurray. To the people of Fort
McMurray, May 3rd looked like any other day. But it was going to be
hot and dry. That afternoon, wind would be added into the mix: once
an inversion layer raised. To make matters worse, all of the fire
indices were off the charts.
How
do you talk about something fearsome
without turning people fearful?
The
Chisholm Firestorm
in
2001. The precursor to this fire.
The
fire chief was asked, what is the worst scenario? The answer was a
fire which they could not stop.
Chapter
8
This
was not the first major fire which threatened Fort McMurray. It was
only a question of when it would actually happen. Old timers knew
this, but the town had so many new people that they did not recognize
the danger. most
newcomers are focused less on the landscape than on what they can
take from it.
There
are programs which predict fire outcomes. One
of these programs is called Prometheus,
and it was being applied to this fire.
The
Slave Lake rig came into town about 1pm and made for Fire Hall 5.
Technically
speaking, crossover occurs when the ambient temperature in degrees
Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage.
Once crossover is achieved, the fire can take off. The fire will go
into the crown of trees, making a fire unstoppable.
The
fire has jumped the river.
The
residences now had a discrepancy between idea
and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and
divine.
Exponential growth means that you are always reacting to the past,
not understanding the future.
Chapter
9
Vaillant
explores how wildfires are different from floods and hurricanes. He
says that fire
is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters.
In that, they do not follow a predictable course, for the most part.
The
chiefs on the radio were out of touch with what was happening in the
field. See the previous chapter on exponential growth. On the radio,
Forest was saying that there was nothing which they could do to
contain the fire. Under
these circumstances, the only appropriate action is to withdraw and
wait for a change in the fire’s behavior, which usually means a
change in the weather, or nightfall.
The
Slave Lake crew arrived, showed their equipment and saw the fire
coming. They knew there was not any time to do more.
In
each neighborhood, there was only one way in and out-very much like
Paradise where there was limited egress.
Chapter
10
By
early to mid-afternoon, neighborhoods were being evacuated. Not
everybody was getting the notice. But it came as a surprise when the
fire approached people close to their homes. They had issues trying
to comprehend it. Talking about Paul Ayearst, Even
then, his brain, and its fierce loyalty to the status quo, resisted.
This causes Ayearst to ponder and do inconsequential things like lock
his front door and debate which vehicle to take, rather than leaving
immediately. It
has been observed that people in shock or overwhelmed by traumatic
events will focus obsessively on small details.
He finally decided to take his truck. Its thermometer hit 151
degrees. He and his family got stuck in traffic. He was not alone.
He was the last one out of the neighborhood.
Chapter
11
Evacuation
orders were being broadcast for more and more communities. All
equipment and all firefighters in the area were in use. Described
how the city was being attacked by flames and how the evacuation was
stuck in gridlock.
How
fire departments respond to incidents has been standardized by the
Brunachini brothers through the Blue
Card Command.
But this fire was outside of the response of this type of incident
command.
Palmer
as a chief was trying to get equipment out to the firefighters. But
this was hard to do as everything which he would normally see was
burning. It was disorienting.
Structural
fires are usually dealt with in a matter of hours; forest fires,
despite a stated goal of “out by ten,” may require days or weeks
to bring under control.
In other words, when fighting structural fires, it is a discrete
environment-a small set of buildings. But with wildfires it is wide
open about what gets burnt. Also the type of person is different.
Wildfire fighters are built for speed and endurance. This
is one reason you won’t see many powerlifters like Mark Stephens on
a Forestry crew, but you will often see more women.
Today
the distinction is getting more and more blurred between structural
and wilderness. Houses are being built in the Wilderness-Urban
Interface (WUI). So forest fires hit structures and urban fires can
touch off forest fires.
Rule
of thumb: water gallons per minute should match or excess the BTU’s
of a fire. In this case, the fire was winning.
Firefighters
fly towards danger. The mentality is Service
before self.
There was a sense of inexperience by the firefighters. They thought
they could stop this fire. The Slave Lake fire fighters knew better
that they were going to lose a whole boatload of structures. There
was time only to get the residents out before they were overrun.
Chapter
12
He
talks about an experiment which Underwriters
Laboratories did in 2005
with modern furniture vs older furniture. Since modern furniture is
made with plastics and other petroleum based products, the living
room was engulfed in flames in less than five minutes which it took
over 30 minutes for older furniture to have this happen.
Vaillant
notes that the whole city was of similar modern
construction-petroleum based. Whole neighborhoods went up in flames
similar to the experiment above. Neighborhoods were abandoned. Houses
detonated like a bomb-the gas tanks and vehicles parked in them.
Anything with a gas-even bags of Doritos-exploded. Resources were put
into retreat and then stationed to protect critical resources.
Houses were disappearing within five minutes time.
Firefighters
are not expected to run away from danger. Courage
and self-sacrifice are not the exceptions, but the expectations.
At times there was a sense of being caught behind enemy lines.
Fires
are drawn by oxygen and energy.
Story
of Lucas Welch.
BLEVE-boiling
liquid expanding vapor explosion
To
combat the fire, the groups came to a decision that they would set up
20 minutes in front of the fire to combat it. Houses were crowded
together, maybe six feet apart. So if one house caught on fire, the
next one would as well.
Chapter
13
Story
of Wayne McGrath. He had a lot of equipment and his house stood right
in the way of the oncoming fire in Abasand Heights. He is able to
save his house from the first onslaught, but when the fire rushed
past and turned, he was not able to. See his Facebook
video.
House
water lines would break and water would flow. The fire hydrants were
dry.
Because
of the chaos, there was a loss of top-down command. But not
discipline. Each crew did would do what they were trained to do to
the best of their ability-try to put out fires.
Chapter
14
Describes
what happens when you get a fire which heats up like this one did. It
creates its own weather. Burning wood gives off moisture which rises
high in the sky, creating clouds and its own winds. Even lightning.
The resulting clouds are called pyrocumulous and are particularly
dangerous as they will eventually collapse under their own weight,
spreading the fire as if it was a windstorm going in all directions.
Vaillant
talks about something called the
Lucretius Problem.
Essentially, it is that we are limited in understanding situations
based upon our own experience. So when something large happens
outside of that experience, we tend to make it fit into our
experience or in Vaillant’s words, Lucretius
Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and
assimilating things outside their own personal experience.
This was a problem for all involved with this fire as it was larger
and more intense than anybody had previously experienced. The
data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t.
One
of the weak points of the evacuation was the highway-it just could
not handle all of the cars spilling onto it at once from all of the
neighborhoods. Also there was no place for all of the evacuating
citizens to go once they left town. Even fire stations were being
given up to the fire.
Chapter
15
Evening
brought a news conference where there was almost no good news. Only
good news was that so far there were no known fatalities. The next
day was sure to be just as bad or worse.
Ayearst
went back to his house with his son and found that his house was no
longer there.
Chapter
16
Two
pieces of good news: 88,000 people had evacuated without a fatality
and when they got satellite information, they realized that the major
part of the city was still intact.
Bad
news is that May 4th and 5th would be just as bad as May 3rd. The
highs would still be high and the lows were 20 degrees higher than
normal. Once the inversion layer lifts, the smoke escapes, replaced
by fresh oxygen and the fire is at it again.
Describes
firefighting on those days. Also how hard it was to make an air drop
of retardant. As they were running out of food and water, they raided
supermarkets-leaving IOU’s.
Chapter
17
Doctorfire.com-site
of an expert fire researcher. When Vaillant asked about the Fort
McMurray fire, the researcher replied back with the Hamburg
bombing
during World War II. In the end, Vaillant figured out the connection
was that all
that matters to the fire is fuel, weather, and topography.
But beyond that was the connection of incendiaries.
In Hamburg, the incendiaries were the bombs. But in Fort McMurray
they were already in place: all of the gas, propane, fuel and other
chemicals which were stored in people’s garages and houses. Also
the neighborhoods were surrounded by highly flammable trees.
What
role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving
building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?
The
firefighters were learning and adapting. Rather than looking at a
house as something special, they were thinking in terms that it is
another flammable object just like a tree. This came to bear on half
a million dollar houses in the Prospect Creek North subdivision.
Houses there went from something to nothing in three minutes. When
those houses were being designed and built and sold, no one
considered the possibility that they could burn like a refinery fire,
or that the same apparatus used against such fires would be brought
to bear on Prospect Drive.
Ronnie
Lukan
is a man of action temperamentally.
He gets a big excavator and starts to knock down houses, pushing
stuff into basements. They would knock down whole streets worth to
create an urban firebreak.
On
May 5th, Allen gave the fire a name, The Beast. It seemed like the
fire was living, that it had a voracious
intention.
In another neighborhood, the firefighters were wetting down the
forest before the neighborhood when instantaneously a hundred yards
of forest went up in flames.
Having
the high ground is a disadvantage-heat rises and so do the flames.
Part
Three: Reckoning
Vaillant
starts talking more like Naomi Oreskes here. He will go through the
history of climate change and why this is of concern. I am suspicious
that Vailolant used the Fort McMurray fire more as a pretext to talk
about how climate change is affecting our world, rather than the fire
being the driving force behind writing the book.
Chapter
18
Talks
about Joseph
Priestly’s
experiments of atmosphere in a closed environment.
In
today’s environment, each of us command more energy and
communications than anybody else in history before let's say 1930 or
even later. It would take hundreds of slaves to pull our trailers and
pickups. But in a closed environment, the occupants of the pickup
truck would be dead in an hour while out in the open air, it
magically goes away.
Because
we are myopic, we tend to see only what is close to us. If what we
should see is clear, we do not see it at all.
Ignaz
Semmelweis
made hand washing standard practice. He did this by observing and
wondering. It was Louis Pasteur who gave the theory behind the
practice.
Horace
Bénédict de Saussere
made a portable greenhouse and showed that the sun’s ability to
heat remains constant despite the temperatures or elevations.
Chapter
19
Eunice
Newton Foote-did
a variation on Saussure’s
chambered box idea.
She filled one chamber with air and the other with CO2.
This showed the CO2
heated up about twice as much as the normal atmosphere. This was done
in 1856. This is recognized as the first greenhouse gas experiment.
Several
others did experiments and figured out components of this. But it was
Guy
Callendar figured
out how industry was impacting temperatures on earth. He tracked the
rising temperatures of various stations. Why? His
inquiry arose from an old-fashioned impulse: curiosity.
He was able to correlate the rise with the amount of industrial
output.
Gilbert
Plass
did experiments which tended to confirm Callendar’s projections. In
the late 1950’s Congressional hearings about polar conditions
brought up how the earth was warming and the issues surrounding it.
Roger
Revelle
talked about and testified before Congress in the 1950’s about the
warming of the oceans and atmosphere and the effects that would have
on the livability of current places on earth.
Chapter
20
Those
who are less well to do are not going to be able to cope with the
changes which are coming about. colonizers
are uniformly destructive to the health and well-being of the people
and places they deem themselves entitled to occupy and exploit.
In
1958, AT&T put together an animated short called The
Unchained Goddess
which portrayed the effects of a changing climate. Out of this 58
minute movie, climate issues appear in the last 3-4 minutes.
Teller
also talked about what was going on with the climate.
Charles
Keeling
measured the amount of CO2
in the atmosphere and created a baseline of 310ppm. (January 2024
reading from Mauna Loa where Keeling did his work was 422ppm)
In
the 1960’s several reports were issued raising the alarm about the
danger ahead. Even petroleum companies and energy groups created
these reports.
And
this gets us back to the Lucretius
Problem
where we are blind to problems which we have not faced before. There
is a 1982 Exxon chart on the effect of manmade CO2
versus natural temperature changes (see an Exxon internal memo from
1982 on page 35 of a pdf.)
By the late 1980’s this was becoming front page news.
Global
Climate Coalition-this
is an industry group which is trying cast doubt on what is being
shown. They worked on discrediting scientists who had shown how CO2
was affecting the atmosphere. What they were saying fits better into
the capitalist way of thinking: earn more, spend more, burn more.
The
one thing which the climate scientists got wrong was the speed at
which CO2
is affecting temperatures.
Vaillant
keeps on saying that scientists are humble and cautious. I think this
is not a complete picture, especially the humble part. Vaillant tries
to paint a picture that scientists go wherever the data leads them.
But they do come into the argument with their own prejudices and
preconceived notions. Also while basic science is pretty set, various
theories are modified. Take evolution. Would Darwin recognize what is
known as evolution today?
Chapter
21
In
Australia the first pyro-tornado was seen. A new fire category of
fire warnings was instituted above Extreme: Catastrophic. The
directive for “Catastrophic” fire could not be more stark: “For
your survival, leaving early is the only option.”
Reviews
the 2018 Carr Fire near Redding. There was another fire tornado here.
The Australian fire tornado was not unique. Recaps the destruction
seen in this fire. Firebreaks no longer worked. Talks about
Bustillos making it out alive, surviving a flashover. If he had left
a few minutes earlier, he would have died like Jeremy Stoke.
Bustillos had been inside the fire tornado, an EF-3.
One
of the lessons learned is that there is not a way for firefighters to
fight fires which are superheated like these. Firefighters
are never going to not engage,” Deputy Chief Jonathan Cox told me,
“but now firefighters are having to retreat sooner.”
In situations like this, the emphasis changes from firefighting to
evacuations and saving lives.
Chapter
22
2017
was not a better fire year than 2016. There is a progression of bad
fire years. In Australia one even created its own ozone hole. There
is evidence that multiple large fires can affect the climate
worldwide.
Our
unprecedented success (and emissions) are due first to our mastery of
fire, and second to our exploitation of fossil fuels in all their
varied forms.
We
have to go back 300,000,000 years to find this much CO2
being released into the atmosphere. Things start off well with life
flourishing during that period and then life being choked out-the
Permian-Triassic
Extinction Event.
According to Wikipedia, we do not know the exact cause of this
event, but there was a great deal of volcanic activity creating dense
SO2
and CO2.
It
sounds like Vaillant may not always be straightforward with his
interpretation of things. Such as the above with the Permian-Triassic
Extinction Event. Did it take both SO2
and CO2
to do the extinction? Was it above the 420ppm density? Wikipedia
notes that it may have been over 10,000ppm. Later he does say we have
a long way to go before we get to the Permian-Triassic Extinction
Event levels. Also he goes on to say there have been five great
extinction events. Then he says that scientists say we are in the
midst of a sixth one. But is it CO2.driven
as he alludes to?
He
quotes Henry David Thoreou. And then says that This
time, it is not fire we have to master, but ourselves.
He
differentiates between drought which is a normal cycle with
aridification where we are just getting dry with no cycle. This will
lead to desertification.
With
every degree of warming, there is a 12 percent increase in lightning.
Wow!
Which causes more fires
Chapter
23
Back
to the fire. The big mining companies never shut down. But now they
were being faced with something bigger than their operations. So they
started to shut down. Workers were evacuated. This was about a week
into the fire.
The
Lucretius
Problem
of I have not seen this before, so it is something new kept cropping
up.
Two
weeks into the fire, residents were still not allowed back and parts
of the city burned, just not nearly like the first couple of days.
Insurance adjusters started coming into the city and found putrid
food and devastation.
More
on McGrath.
In
early June residents were let in. Even seeing neighborhoods on TV did
not prepare them for the devastation. The
aftermath of a major wildfire has its own palette.
Fires tend to leave everything gray from ash and soot. Everything was
ruined.
Samaritan’s
Purse
came in and helped to try to find anything which would be of value or
use or memory. McGrath said Nobody
seems to understand how much you lose.
McGrath
ended up committing suicide.
Nearly
a quarter of the Fort McMurray population did not return. People
waited up to two years for their insurance money, but in the
meantime, those with mortgages still had to pay off the loans,
businesses still had to pay landlords. Housing prices were dropping.
Because of the severe heat, nothing, even concrete, had to be removed
and rebuilt.
Chapter
24
It
sounds like even in 2023 when the book was written, neither Fort
McMurray nor the local economy has recovered. One thing, the
companies are taking the opportunity to make their operations more
automated. Such as autonomous haulers-self-driving.
Alberta
is trying to keep its economy going by an assortment of tactics
centered on keeping the mining of bitumen going. There is a sense
that climate change is not real.
But
investors are de-investing in petroleum.
Insurance
companies are recognizing the impact of a changing climate on the
risks they are taking.
But
the energy companies do not have a good way to leave what they are
doing. Once
astride a tiger like this, it appears suicidal to get off—even if
staying on is sure to destroy you in the end.
Or as Vaillant asks a few paragraphs later, Once
a market has taken off, how do you “land” it without crashing?
Or, in the case of petroleum, how do you transition.
Chapter
25
In
2021, a Dutch court ruled that Shell had to reduce its CO2
emissions. Then a day later an Australian court ruled that the
government had a duty to protect its citizens in the matter of the
environment.
Predatory
delay, as Steffen defines it, is “the deliberate slowing of change
to prolong a profitable but unsustainable status quo whose costs will
be paid by others.”
This is what the petroleum industry had done for 40 years, knowing
that they were causing damage to the earth.
350.org-a
group to stop the use of fossil fuels.
Pensions
and investors are removing petroleum from their investments. Home
Depot was worth more than ExxonMobil, and NextEra, a wind and solar
company most people have never heard of, had a greater market
capitalization.
Chapter
26
Four
and half months after the fire started, it was still burning-it would
burn into the next summer before being declared out. It burnt 2,300
square miles into a neighboring province. But no direct deaths. But
there were many cases similar to PTSD. “After
the fire,” he said, “I kept being asked how the community was,
and my answer was always the same: ‘Imagine a city—thousands of
people—all living in everyday harmony, each and every one with some
aspect of PTSD.’ “
John
Knox, the program director for a radio station said Ours
has long been a blended world; there are forests in cities everywhere
from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, and there are cathedrals in forests.
One thing which this fire and Redding and those in Australia taught
us was that even cities are not a refuge from wildfire. Sanctuaries
[such as museums, churchs] ,
almost by definition, are not supposed to burn.
Epilogue
Vaillant
talks about how after the Redding fire, even in places which looked
scorched, new life was emerging. I have seen this around the places I
have been, such as after the Rough Fire. It was noted that places
where the map had marked springs, water now flowed. Before there was
so much vegetation, it was sucking up all the water. Still there are
Sequoias which has been torched which are dead. They will not be
replaced for another thousand years, if ever.
Earth’s
capacity for revirescence is without parallel in the known universe.
Very questionable statement. What of the universe do we know about
besides our own? Do we even know if life exists on other planets?
He
ends the book with viriditas. He says that it means greeness. But I
think how Hildegard used it, it means more of vitality or growth. But
in a lot of senses, what Vaillant means is that there is always the
hope which humans have that the future will be better.
Evaluation:
Fire
Weather
is written with two emphasizes. First, it talks about the 2016 Fort
McMurray fire. The second part is to explain the underlying causes of
why such a fire is possible in our current age.
It
is my opinion that the author was writing the story about the Fort
McMurray fire so that he could write about how climate has changed
the nature of forest fires. He has this book divided into three
parts: The Fire, how Climate has changed Fire, and what he calls The
Reckoning. His thesis is that we will continue to have fires such as
Fort McMurray as long as we have a planet where the general
temperature is rising.
Vaillant
does a fairly good job of talking about the effect of the fire on
Fort McMurray. What was most interesting was how he describes the
refusal to face how big and how terrifying this fire was going to be.
He introduced me to something called the Lucretius Problem.
Basically, if we have not seen an issue, we try to make it look like
something else and ignore it outside of the boundaries of our
experience.
But
if you want to read about wildfires, you can do better with a book
like Timothy Egan’s The
Big Burn
or Under
a Flaming Sky
by Daniel James Brown.
As
said before, I think Vaillant writes the story of this fire so he can
pull together how we are all in danger of our changing environment.
He walks us through the science of climate change where the first
experiments were done in the early 1800’s to the more current day
research. He shows how as the CO2
is building up in our atmosphere, it is following the pattern set out
by Guy Callendar.
And
then there is the refusal to accept what is happening to us, much
like the professionals of Fort McMurray did not recognize how the
fire would overcome them. Vaillant seems to combine up both the
Lucretius Problem with the profit motive. Here he is following in the
footsteps of Naomi Oreskes in her book Merchants
of Doubt.
There is a vested interest of those who make a profit from petroleum
to spread doubt about the findings of scientists. This seems to be
the main point which Vaillant stresses.
One
thing Vaillant does not do is talk about how we as American consumers
are a part of the issue. He talks about the big petroleum companies
which produce our products. But not about the consumption of those
products. This seems like it is a weakness in the book.
Should
you read the book? If you want another book about wildfire, you can
do better. If you want to see how our changing climate affects
wildfire, this book ties it together.
Notes from my book group:
What
did you learn about wildfire? How to fight wildfires vs urban fires?
What happens when the two merge?
There
is a growing Wildlife-Urban Interface (WUI) happening in North
America. Why do people want to live in the WUI? What impact does that
have in general? What problems does a fire have fighting it in the
WUI?
When
you are looking at a neighborhood, what do you look for? Is “how do
you get out” in an emergency one of them?
What
does Vaillant mean when he says there was a discrepancy between idea
and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and
divine?
Vaillant
says that fire
is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters.
Do you agree?
Have
you been in a widespread disaster? How did you react? Was there an
evacuation order? Did you follow the order?
When
a mandatory evacuation order is issued, some people stay to save what
they can of theirs. Why do they do that? What is the effect on the
firefighting operations?
Valiant
uses the term homo flagrams (burning man). Do you think this is an
appropriate term for humans in our current age?
Underwriters
Labs did an experiment with modern furniture about how long it took
for a room to go up in flames. What were the results? Why did the
modern go up faster than the older furniture? What should you be
looking for in furniture? Vaillant asks, What
role does the petroleum industry play in promoting and approving
building materials that are supposed to shelter families from harm?
The
fire chief was in an interview, on the air and he was faced with a
delicate balance. How do you talk about things which are fearsome
without turning people fearful?
How would you do it? It was told to some of the leaders that they
faced a lose-lose proposition. If they alerted people too early, they
would be accused of fear-mongering, particularly if the things they
feared did not occur. But if they did not and the bad thing happened,
then there was a failure to raise the alarm. How should leaders talk
about concerns they have in a way which will convey their concerns?
How should we as citizens react when the worst does not happen?
What
is the Lucretius Problem? How is this an issue when faced with
something like a disaster? How can one avoid giving false solutions
when faced with a problem outside of their experience? Accountability
is a major theme in our society these days. How can we make our
leaders more responsive to big problems without reducing
accountability?
Why
didn’t people die or were even injured from the fire or during the
evacuation? What lessons can we learn from this?
Vaillant
describes the aftermath of the damage to people’s lives. What
support systems should be in place to aid after these major
incidents? How can people be helped to cope with the feeling of loss?
Describe
the progression of experiments which Vaillants uses to demonstrate
that CO2
build up is a threat to how life is on earth? Are they convincing? Is
there a different view or research which shows contrary evidence?
Does Vaillant talk about this evidence? How does this build up of CO2
lead to more intense fires? Are you convinced? If so, why? If not,
what would it take to convince you?
He
talks about the difference between drought and aridification. What is
the difference? Why does this difference matter?
What
was the petroleum industry’s response to being faced with the
evidence that the amount of CO2
in the atmosphere was causing issues? Why did they respond in this
way?
What
can you do to stop the increase in CO2
creation?
How
do you want your life to change because you read this book?
Many
of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.
Why
the title of Fire
Weather?
Does
this story work as a book about wildfire? Climate change?
Did
the ending seem fitting? Satisfying? Predictable?
Every
story has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s
world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?
Why
do you think the author wrote this book?
What
would you ask the author if you had a chance?
What
“takeaways” did you have from this book?
What
central ideas does the author present?
Are
they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual,
medical, or scientific
What
evidence
does the author use to support the book's ideas?
Is
the evidence convincing...definitive or...speculative?
Does
the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and assessment?
Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical
documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?
What
implications for you, our nation or the world do these ideas have?
Are
these idea’s controversial?
To
whom and why?
Are
there solutions which the author presents?
Do
they seem workable? Practicable?
How
would you implement them?
Describe
the culture talked about in the book.
How
is the culture described in this book different than where we live?
What
economic or political situations are described?
Does
the author examine economics and politics, family traditions, the
arts, religious beliefs, language or food?
Talk
about specific passages that struck you as significant—or
interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?
What
was memorable?
New Words: