Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

On May 7, the bitumen processing plants in Fort McMurray started to close down. The operations were so “huge, complicated, expensive, and temperamental” that they rarely, if ever, shut down completely (313). However, by May 7, the smoke reduced visibility to yards. One worker at Suncor noted that while patrolling for spot fires in his plant, he saw deer and coyotes exploring the industrial yard.

On May 9, journalists were finally allowed to access Fort McMurray under escort. The damage from the 500,000-acre wildfire was unprecedented, and Fire Chief Darby Allen expressed shock to the media at the fire’s behavior. He noted that it did not follow expected wildfire behavior, so they had to start from scratch in devising fire containment strategies. Vaillant compares Allen’s response to the Lucretius problem: It wasn’t like anything Allen had seen, so he considered it unprecedented.

The smoke was so bad that it blocked out the sun in Alberta and “cast a pall” over the entire continent (317), northward to Labrador and southward to Texas. Few people remained in Fort McMurray, so the town itself appeared dormant. The power was out, so the food in people’s fridges and freezers spoiled, rotting and attracting “teeming” hordes of flies.