BOOK REVIEW: IT’S GETTING HOT IN HERE
Fire Weather
John Vaillant
Knopf
359 p.
It really is such a stitch in time.
As John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather, observes, “the idea that our atmosphere could be changed – by us – is not something we have ever, in our entire history, had to consider seriously until a single lifetime ago, which is about as long as we have had to seriously consider the automobile.”
And now, “Our civilization, our engines and our markets are not the only things that have been supercharged by fossil fuels. Our atmosphere is a weather engine, and it has been supercharged, too.”
Unfortunately, while petroleum has allowed people to burn bigger, brighter and faster, “binges are, by their nature, finite.”
Learned that in college.
Vaillant’s Fire Weather is part gripping saga of the 2016 fire which wiped out the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada.
Fort McMurray was a bitumen (oil) industry town, with a population of 90,000.
Its median income was $200,000/year. Its nickname: Fort McMoney
But $10 billion of McMoney was wiped out overnight by the blaze – a function of a lingering drought and very unusual weather conditions for early May (high temperatures and low humidity).
As one firefighter explained, “We had a plan and it was good for forty-five years … and then the first time that we actually, physically had to do our plan it fell to shit.”
But what’s a firefighter to do when a wildfire , at its peak, is releasing the equivalent of four Hiroshima bombs of energy.
Per minute.
And the wind is blowing so hard that it sends embers jumping across a river that’s two miles wide.
This was not the first such fire in Alberta.
A previous blaze, the Chinchaga Fire of 1950, was so intense that the scientist
Carl Sagan wondered if the effects resembled nuclear winter.
Then there was the Chisholm Fire of 2001, whose smoke plume rose eight miles into the atmosphere.
In his narrative, Vaillant describes how firefighters have to alter their strategy to save anything at all.
Given that entire homes were vaporizing in three to five minutes, if firefighters saw one house on fire, they’d start watering down a home five houses down – figuring that’s the one they might save.
A lot of the intensity of modern fire is due to the nature of modern construction.
“When a wildfire enters a residential community, the result – for the fire – is a smorgasbord of kiln-dried fuel topped with tar shingles, garnished with rubber tires and gas tanks.”
Vaillant describes a 2005 experiment by Underwriters Laboratories where they created a pair of model living rooms, one filled with “legacy” furnishings – wooden tables and chairs, couches with cotton upholstery, lace curtains. Stuff that’s considered “antique.”
And then a modern living room, with plastic, wood “products” bound with glues andf resins, couches upholstered with polyester and stuffed with polyurethane.
Here’s the passage:
“The fires were started with candles in the sofa cushions and, for the first minute ot so, the only difference was in the quality of the smoke, which was much darker and more acrid. At three minutes, the modern room is clearly in trouble, with the sofa fully engaged. Then, just twenty seconds later, something unexpected happns: the modern living room bursts into flame, engulfing everything … what only seconds earlier had been a living room with a burning sofa was now raging like a refinery fire. Meanwhile, next door in the legacy room, the smoke is minimal and the fire, while clearly growing, could be doused with a bucket of water or a small fire extinguisher.
Modern homes, he says simply, are petroleum vapor chambers.
Lessons from our ancestors have been forgotten, he says, due to a relatively cool and rainy 20th century and improved fire suppression.
And exacerbated by the inexorable push of real estate into the wildland-urban interface (WUI).
The ancestors would say, “Don’t build your house in the woods, surround it with open fields; not only does this make for convenient planting and pasturage, but those cleared lands also serve as excellent firebreaks. Roofs made of tin or slate go a long way toward foiling embers.”
We ignore them and just keep building. Right next to the forest. In places like Mammoth. And wonder why no one wants to insure any of it.
The book is great on climate science. Great on its description of fire as … a living organism. Great in describing fire events like “crossover” where air temperature exceeds relative humdity as a percentage and … look out, for that’s the ultimate multiplier effect.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” -Albert Allen Bartlett
If you want to know how and why the world has changed and why rural towns in the WUI particularly need to pay attention, read this book.
And maybe vote yes on Measure M next Tuesday.
