Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

 

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:

• Biome: a large naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, e.g. forest or tundra.
• scow tracking: any floating plant which transports dredge material to be a scow
• Neologism: a newly coined word or expression.
• Spalling: break (ore, rock, stone, or concrete) into smaller pieces, especially in preparation for sorting.
• Miasma: a highly unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapor.
• Gyre: whirl or gyrate.
• Metonym: a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated
• Anthropogenic: (chiefly of pollution or environmental change) originating in human activity
• igneous storm: forms through intense, fiery heat — usually in a volcano
• Desiccated: to dry up
• cri de coeur: a passionate appeal, complaint, or protest.
• Revirescence: growing fresh or young again

Book References:

• North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb
• De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius
• Antifragile by Nassim Taleb
• Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
• The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
• Observations on Different Kinds of Air
• Analytical Theory of Heat
• Heat: A Mode of Motion
• Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe by Svante Arrhenius
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
• The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
• The Ice at the End of the World by Jon Gertner
• Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

Good Quotes:

• First Line: On a hot afternoon in May 2016, five miles outside the young petro-city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, a small wildfire flickered and ventilated, rapidly expanding its territory through a mixed forest that hadn’t seen fire in decades.
• Last Line: Homo viriditas can guide us forward—and, possibly, back
• Men have become the tools of their tools. Henry David Thoreau, Walden

: 

 

Table of Contents:

• Cover
• Other Titles
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map of Northwest North America
• Map of Fort McMurray
• Part One: Origin Stories
• Prologue
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Part Two: Fire Weather
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Part Three: Reckoning
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Epilogue
• Color Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Image Credits
• A Note About the Author

References:

• Publisher's Website for Book
• Author's WebsiteX/Twitter
• Wikipedia-Author
• Amazon-Book
• Amazon-Author
• Barnes and Noble
• GoodReads-Book
• GoodReads-Author
• New York Times Review
• The Guardian’s Review
• NPR Review
• Wildfire Today - FIRE WEATHER Reviews: Two perspectives, similar conclusions
• Kirkus Review
• YouTube
• Library of Congress
• National Book Foundation Finalist
• Baille Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction