I balanced between destiny and dread
And saw it coming, clouds bloodshot with the red
Of victory fires, the raw wound of that dawn
Igniting and erupting, bearing down
Like lava on a fleeing population.
—Seamus Heaney, “Mycenae Lookout”
Since the last days of April, fires had been a throbbing presence on the horizon around the city, their smoke plumes bending with the wind as they rose and fell with air temperature and barometric pressure, passing to and fro through a grayscale spectrum: white to charcoal and back again, often many shades together. In the morning and evening when the sun was low, shades of brown and orange would emerge and then recede. For those living in the boreal forest, these shifting, earthborne clouds represented a familiar seasonal awareness, occupying the same mental space as the possibility of a thunderstorm or a blizzard—one among many manageable threats long since factored into the calculus of daily concerns.
After its discovery, and after it proved impossible to subdue, the fire southwest of town was given a code—MWF-009 (McMurray Wild Fire 009), because it was the ninth substantial fire discovered in the Fort McMurray Fire District that year. Fire 009 was not yet a day old, but already it was clear that this one was different. Since first being spotted at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, it had increased in size by five hundred times. Much of that growth was toward the city, and preemptive evacuations had been ordered for several neighborhoods closest to the fire. By 10:00 a.m. on Monday the 2nd, the fire had expanded to two thousand acres; an hour later it was over three thousand. Then, it doubled again. Despite the efforts of eighty firefighters, two bulldozer groups, and several water bombers, Fire 009 was zero percent contained.
At 5:30 p.m. on the 2nd, city officials held a press conference, their second fire-related media briefing of the day. Standing at a lectern before a handful of reporters, Mayor Melissa Blake, forty-six years old and halfway into her fourth term, wore her long, auburn hair tied back over a short-sleeve sheath dress with purple accents and matching earrings. Referring to notes on her phone as she spoke, her tone was measured, her pace crisp, and, in light of what was unfolding nearby, her demeanor eerily calm. But Blake was used to explosions; since 2004, she had been the disarming face of this ultimate boomtown, whose convulsive growth had outpaced its American counterparts in North Dakota, Colorado, and Texas. During her tenure, she had ridden a wave of money and manpower that doubled Fort McMurray’s population in a decade and turned her hometown into a city as oil surged past $100 a barrel and majors from around the world rushed in to capitalize on the seemingly limitless—and, finally, profitable—potential of Alberta bitumen.
After touching on the evacuation of some eighty horses due to the weekend fires, Blake turned her attention to Fire 009. Bulldozers, she said, had been working day and night to clear a firebreak between that fire and the highway. Firebreaks, created by scraping broad strips of forest down to unburnable mineral soil, are also known as “dozerguards”—or “catguards,” because many of the bulldozers used to clear them are manufactured by Caterpillar. Some of the Cats they were using were D10s, hundred-ton machines that can clear a residential street of all its cars, pavement, and boulevard trees in a couple of passes. The dozers’ objective was to create what amounted to an unburnable dirt moat between the fire and the city. “Trust the experts in the field,” Blake told her audience. “They’re doing the best that they can with the circumstances they’ve got, the equipment that’s there, and the resources that are coming in.
“What really has a bigger impact, of course,” she added, “is what happens with our weather.”
In Fort McMurray that week, nothing mattered more, and Blake’s forecast for Tuesday, May 3, bode ill: “Wind is predicted to be coming out of the southeast [away from town] in the morning,” she said, “and then it will be southwest in the afternoon.”
Afternoon is when temperatures are highest, winds are strongest, and fire spreads most rapidly; “southwest” put Fort McMurray squarely in the fire’s sights. Today, most mayors presented with such a forecast would order evacuations immediately, especially after saying, as Blake did, that “extreme fire conditions are once again predicted for tomorrow.” But 2016—recent as it is—was a more innocent time. Instead, the mayor emphasized common sense: no open fires, fireworks, or off-roading in the backcountry, no flying drones near firefighting operations, and don’t throw your cigarette butts out the window. Because the fire was also threatening the landfill, recycling would not be picked up that week—“a ripple effect,” Blake said, “as we continue to manage this crisis.” In closing, Blake advised residents who had been preemptively evacuated from the south end of town that they could now return home, where they should continue to “shelter in place”—that is, be ready to leave again at a moment’s notice. A notable exception was Centennial Park, a trailer community west of Highway 63 and closest to Fire 009, the sole neighborhood to remain under mandatory evacuation.
Standing with Mayor Blake that afternoon were two men, Bernie Schmitte and Darby Allen. Schmitte was the fifty-one-year-old regional manager of the Wildfire Division of Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture; a solidly built Albertan whose bespectacled eyes peered out from beneath a high, clean-shaven dome, he had twenty-four years in with the province. Allen was the municipal fire chief, a frank and sober man of fifty-nine who had carried his rugged yeoman’s face and traces of a brummie accent with him all the way from Britain’s Midlands. The men were in uniform. Schmitte wore green cargo pants and a yellow Nomex firefighter’s shirt that bore shoulder patches embroidered with the word “WILDFIRE” in bright red over an image of flames racing through prairie grass and spruce trees—Alberta’s two most flammable landscapes. Allen wore a dark blue short-sleeve shirt and pants held together by a garrison belt and buckled with the firefighter’s Maltese Cross.
The current fire situation, alarming at any time of year, had led city officials, in conjunction with the Ministry of Forests and Alberta Emergency Management, to declare a local state of emergency. In order to manage it, they took the additional step of setting up a Regional Emergency Operations Centre, or REOC—a centralized communications hub that allowed members of all relevant agencies to coordinate their response. The situation was considered serious enough that Blake had formally ceded leadership of the fire response, and of the city itself, to Allen. “Thank you very much, Your Worship,” the chief said when Blake invited him to the mic. After admonishing people for driving off-road vehicles dangerously close to firefighting operations, Allen went on to say, “We had significant fire today, but the reality is that fire hasn’t gotten any closer to town, and that is mainly due to the incredibly hard work of Alberta Forestry. If it wasn’t for them, we’d be in a much worse situation.”
With that, Allen invited Schmitte to the mic. After giving an update on firefighting equipment and personnel, and saying that more of both were on the way, Schmitte closed on an upbeat note: “We’re in for another challenging day tomorrow,” he said, “but we have made some progress today, and our guys are feeling pretty good.”
“How far away is the fire from the closest residence?” asked a reporter.
Schmitte’s calm answer was one and a half kilometers—about a mile. The subject of wind came up again when another reporter asked Allen if he was surprised that there had been no structure loss yet, given how rapidly the fire had spread the previous day. “I don’t know if ‘surprised’ is the right word,” the fire chief answered. “We’re certainly thankful. We’re blessed that we didn’t have thirty-five-kilometer winds in the wrong direction.”
But thirty-five kilometer winds—twenty-two miles an hour—blowing “in the wrong direction” was precisely the forecast for May 3. At that speed, a fire like 009 could travel a mile in a matter of minutes, especially under the extraordinarily flammable conditions in evidence that spring. Reporters did not bring it up again, but it recalled a comment Allen had made at the morning briefing: “It’s way drier this year than it’s been for a long, long time,” he’d said. “I heard fifty years.
“We’ve had four significant fires in the last five days or so,” he had added, “so that’s pretty intense. Hopefully, Nature’s done its thing and it’ll leave us alone for a little bit.”
But hope is a human construct, a coping mechanism in the face of uncertainty that holds no sway in the natural world. And yet, hope, like fear, is contagious, communicable; when expressed by a respected leader, like Darby Allen, it has the power to create an imaginary zone of protection around a group. Hope—the willpower of positive thinking—is clearly adaptive to human survival. To remain cohesive under pressure, communities need trustworthy authority figures capable of leading by example and exhorting others to manage their thoughts and feelings, especially doubt and fear. But there is a fine line between hope and denial and delusion.
There was something else the chief had said that morning, but somehow, it, too, got lost in the noise: “The slightest sign that we see people are in jeopardy, we will evacuate again.”
Even as the afternoon press conference was wrapping up, the fire was taking off. Anyone who had the Alberta Wildfire Info app would have seen the alert at 6:17 p.m. declaring Fire 009 to be “OC”—out of control. This meant that no containment had been achieved on any front. Once a wildfire reaches this level of intensity, there will be no further attempts to confront it directly. Instead, firefighting resources—ground crews, bulldozers, and water bombers—focus on the flanks, and on removing potential fuel in hopes of slowing the fire’s forward progress. Witnesses that evening described a raging crown fire that sent jet-like whorls of flame spiraling into the smoky, twilit sky. The plume was now gigantic. A local journalist named Vince McDermott posted a photo taken from Lac Laloche, in the neighboring province of Saskatchewan: Fire 009 was plainly visible eighty miles away.
When firefighter Ryan Coutts saw the evening update on the Wildfire Info app, he fully understood the threat this fire posed, but he was one of the few. Coutts, a 220-pound, hockey-playing twenty-year-old with wavy blond hair and sea-green eyes, had been fighting fire since he was in high school. He was based out of Slave Lake, a small town of 7,500 four hours southwest of Fort McMurray, through the forest. The Slave Lake Fire Department is largely volunteer, and its chief, Jamie Coutts, built like his son, only thicker, was an outspoken, gap-toothed, slightly piratical forty-three-year-old with a graying buzzcut and twenty-five years of firefighting experience. After five minutes in conversation with either man on the subject of boreal fire, it is clear that they are people you want nearby when one of these monsters comes out of the woods.
The Slave Lake Fire Department—comprised of just thirty volunteers and nine paid positions, including support staff—was self-reliant because it had to be. Isolated, and hours from outside help, the town lies at the east end of Lesser Slave Lake in what could be described as a fire corridor. As one longtime analyst with Alberta’s Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture put it, “A lot of ash has fallen on that town.” Its small, scrappy fire department has managed to fend off most of these blazes, but not all of them. In 2011, tiny Slave Lake, virtually unknown outside Alberta, became nationally famous overnight when a wildfire, supercharged by eighty-mile-an-hour winds, burned down more than a third of the town in a matter of hours. Five hundred homes and other buildings were lost, including the town hall, the library, and the radio station; fifteen thousand people were evacuated across the region. In the ensuing days and weeks, what came to be known as the Flat Top Complex Fire burned nearly three thousand square miles of forest. The losses to the timber industry were tallied in the millions of dollars; the losses to the region’s burgeoning petroleum industry approached half a billion and impacted the province’s GDP. It was, at the time, the largest evacuation and most expensive natural disaster in Alberta history. Amazingly, there were no fatalities save for a single Quebecois helicopter pilot.
In an effort to convey the intensity of the fire that savaged his hometown, Chief Coutts rattled off a list of effects: “Metal melted, concrete spalled, a granite statue was reduced to pebbles—basically, all moisture was released from everything. I kept hearing 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Too hot—that’s all I remember.”
“It actually incinerated the concrete,” explained a volunteer named Ronnie Lukan. “It pulled the moisture out so you could touch the concrete and it would peel off.”
This is what spalling is; it’s a verb you don’t encounter much below a thousand degrees.
There is destructive fire, which burns down houses and forests, and then there’s transformative fire, which makes familiar objects—like houses—disappear altogether, and leaves whatever’s left—the cement foundation, the steel reinforcement rod holding it together—altered at the molecular level. This is what happened in Slave Lake in 2011: large, expensive things like riding lawnmowers couldn’t be found because they had, more or less, vaporized. Little remained besides cast iron bathtubs and the warped husks of furnaces and cars. In the aftermath, a formal review was conducted, faults were found, and recommendations were made. Among the many findings was the disturbing determination that the fire was not started by lightning or by accident, but by arson.[*] A surprising number of people saw the Slave Lake fire as a one-off and said it couldn’t happen again. But none of those people serves in the Slave Lake Fire Department.
As far away as it was, the Couttses had been keeping an eye on Fire 009. “We’re all sitting in Slave Lake,” Ryan said, “itching to go, right? We see a big fire right outside, and we’d been there before—we were there in 2011—we didn’t call in extra help and it bit us in the ass, to say the least.”
Both Ryan and his father knew what Fort McMurray might be up against, what their strategy would probably be, and how it would likely fail—because they had already tried it. “We had a plan and it was good for forty-five years,” Jamie told me, “and then the first time that we actually, physically, had to do our plan, it fell to shit. So from that day, we went forward going, ‘There can’t be a plan, there has to be a bunch of plans.’ ”
In fairness, Slave Lake’s plan had been a sound one: “We would go to the edges of town, we would hook up to all the fire hydrants, and we would spray water out towards the forest, and onto the houses in the first ring,” the chief explained, “and that would hold the fire. But in 2011, there was 50,000 burning embers raining down for every acre—50,000 spot fires. So, that’s what happened. People think of a fire like their campfire, like it’s contained, like it’s just going to be a wall of fire. But when it gets windy enough, and hot enough, and crazy enough, it’s going to come at you—not as a wall of fire, but as a wall of fire with hundreds of thousands of hot embers spewing out the top of it, going half a mile, or a mile in front of it.”
This means you can be doing a terrific job fighting the fire, but behind you—a block, a neighborhood, a valley away—your town can still be burning down. Fortified cities have fallen this way for millennia: while soldiers held their own at the wall or on the field, somewhere in the trees, behind the front line, hidden archers were loosing flaming arrows into the heart of the town. In the end, defeat arrives from behind. It is tempting to give credit for this fiendish strategy to great military minds of the ancient world—the Chinese, the Assyrians, or the Greeks—but any shepherd or hunter watching a wind-driven forest fire from a hilltop could have figured it out, especially when those embers started landing on them.
Wildfires are commonly described as a single entity moving across a landscape, but big ones can be divided into three distinct parts, and the ways in which they travel and impact human settlements have an analog in medieval warfare, which they may have inspired. Without wind to drive them, most ground fires tend to progress slowly, creeping outward from their source like a roadside cigarette fire. These low flames and smolders represent the foot soldiers—slow-moving and most easily defeated. Wind and dry fuel can get a fire moving, but in order to rise into the treetops, a fire requires “ladder fuels”—brush, saplings, and low branches, which allow the fire to climb upward into a tree’s crown. This marks a transformative moment for a fire: up in the crown there is more wind and much more mobility. A “crown fire” corresponds to mounted troops: much faster moving than a ground fire, and far more charismatic, it will charge ahead with flags and pennants waving. Once in the treetops, the fire’s heat can generate its own wind as it sucks up oxygen from ahead and below. The wind, in turn, liberates and empowers the fire still further: no longer bound to its fuel source, the fire can now fly ahead of itself in the form of sparks and embers: these are the archers. The analogy can be extended further to include recon units: ember-generated spot fires, and even “sleeper cells” in the form of smoldering roots, which can act on delay, months or even entire seasons later.
Jamie Coutts had been in touch with his counterparts in Fort McMurray on Sunday, May 1. “We knew it was going to be hot, we knew it was going to be dry, we knew it was going to be windy: that’s May,” Coutts said. “It was close, and we knew they were struggling with the fire, and there was lots of people around [and at risk]. Forestry was hammering it with what they had, but you could see on the news that it wasn’t enough.”
On May 2, Coutts received a call from Fort McMurray inquiring about the availability of his sprinkler rig, which included 120 garden sprinklers, four gas-powered pumps, and a mile of hose in various lengths and diameters. “Of course, we were already packed up,” he said, “so we were like, ‘Well, we can leave in ten minutes.’ Then they hassled me quite a bit about the money.”
The Fort McMurray Fire Department employs 185 professional firefighters, citywide, operating out of four fire halls plus a 911 dispatch center. Its members are among the highest-paid firefighters in North America, a four-way by-product of a strong union, Fort McMurray’s formidable tax base (you cannot buy a trailer home for less than $200,000), the town’s close association with the multibillion-dollar petroleum industry, and the fact that people living in northern communities get living allowance subsidies from the Canadian government. Furthermore, firefighters’ work schedules are such that many members operate private businesses on their off time. Of those 185 firefighters, almost all of whom are white, and roughly 80 percent of whom are men, about 30 are on duty at any given time, with an additional 20 or 30 on call.
With its much bigger, better-funded, full-time department, Fort McMurray was interested in Slave Lake’s sprinkler system, which Jamie Coutts had designed and assembled from the ground up, but they didn’t want to pay for more men, even men with Ryan and Jamie’s experience. On Sunday, May 1, Fire 009 was still a wildland fire and so, technically, Forestry’s problem, but it was growing rapidly, and officials recognized the need for additional sprinklers on the town’s southern perimeter. They were also aware that the fire weather—the dynamic relationship between temperature, relative humidity, the fuel load in the forest, and the moisture content of that fuel load—was growing more favorable to fire by the day. Even so, many in Fort McMurray’s fire department simply couldn’t imagine a fire capable of breaching their considerable defenses, which included new firebreaks, transmission tower and pipeline corridors, seismic lines, greenways, a major highway, and the Athabasca River. And there was another reason: this wasn’t just any town; this was Fort Mac. Because of its young, skilled, and ambitious population, and the enormous wealth infused by the petroleum industry, Fort McMurray exuded some of the same bullish swagger that major oil hubs like Calgary and Houston (both cities with whom Fort McMurray maintains close ties) are famous for. Because of its industry connections, many of Fort McMurray’s facilities are not only named after oil companies, but also built to specifications far beyond what you would expect to find in such a remote and isolated place. The water treatment plant, rec center, hospital, municipal building, and fire department, to name a few, are all top of the line. Furthermore, when you know that the bitumen plants, thirty minutes away, will back you up with their industry-grade equipment and highly trained crews, offers from small-town fire departments—no matter how earnest or urgent—are low priority.
But what Slave Lake was really offering was not so much equipment as experience—a way of thinking about boreal fire that could save lives and infrastructure. “We want them to know about sprinklers, and we want them to know about forest fires,” Jamie Coutts explained. “We have some really good trailers that we put together, that have been battle-tested, had lots of deployments. So it just seemed like we should get our stuff up there.”
Linked sprinkler systems, in which small sprinklers are rapidly mounted on the rooftops or fascia boards of individual houses, and connected in series to a gas-powered water pump fed from a lake, river, or water bladder, is not an urban firefighting technique. It’s a technique used in rural areas where resources are limited and the threat of fire may be widespread across space and time. With linked sprinklers, an isolated community or neighborhood can protect itself, as long as the water supply holds out and the pumps keep running. This is not an approach many municipal fire departments are familiar with because most urban fires originate inside the community—in a house or a building, a specific location where a hydrant, trucks, and firefighters can be brought to bear. The notion that a fire might enter the community from somewhere else, across a broad front—like a tsunami, or a hurricane—is beyond the scope of most structural firefighters’ experience, even in Fort McMurray. But in Slave Lake, it’s a scenario with which firefighters are now bitterly familiar.
Since their traumatizing experience in 2011, the Slave Lake Fire Department had become evangelists for fire safety and education regarding the hazards of living in the woods. Slave Lake’s lean, agile, quasi-guerilla style of post-2011 firefighting differs in crucial ways from its unionized, hierarchal, textbook-following urban counterpart. “For us [now] there is no box,” Ryan Coutts told me, “so you don’t have to think outside of it, you just roll in there thinking. We always surround ourselves with people that can be put into any situation.”
These methods, while unorthodox, would prove invaluable in the coming days.
But on May 2, despite the fact that Slave Lake had burned only five years prior, at the same time of year, under conditions nearly identical to those facing Fort McMurray, and despite the fact that fire departments in the region have mutual aid agreements with an established protocol for equipment and manpower loans, there was pushback on the Fort McMurray side. In the end, Jamie Coutts said he agreed to let Fort McMurray borrow his $200,000 sprinkler rig for a pittance—without the Slave Lake crew who knew best how to deploy it. But Coutts had designed and built this system, and he insisted on giving a demo before being sent home. The back-and-forth had delayed the trailer’s arrival by a day, and it was during this twenty-four-hour period that the fire south of town, now numbered and named like a tropical storm, was declared by Forestry to be out of control. But as dire as it sounds, “OC” is not the most extreme designation for a boreal fire.
Later that evening, the fire did something no fire ought to be doing at that hour: energized by its own ferocious heat and by winds that should have settled down at dusk, it drove embers all the way across the Athabasca River, where they started a new fire. The Athabasca is one of the north’s great rivers, on a par with the Mackenzie and the Yukon; its width, outside Fort McMurray, is a third of a mile. Fire 009, already within striking distance of the highway and the south end of the city, now had a beachhead on the north side of the Athabasca River. While still several miles off, this new spot fire had ready access to the entire west side, including the city’s water treatment plant, biggest park, and most densely settled neighborhoods. More important, it demonstrated that, even in its nascent stages, Fire 009 was capable of surmounting any obstacle that Nature or humans could put in its way. Viewed in terms of military tactics, the fire had now arranged itself in what amounted to a double-flanked pincer movement. Fires don’t have the capacity for “strategy,” per se, but if those flames had been divisions deployed by a seasoned general, his peers would have found little to improve on. After nightfall on May 2, the fire settled down to wait out the dark, nursing itself on the exceptionally dry ground fuel, and solidifying its gains. Sunrise on May 3 would be at 5:33; the rest was up to the wind.
* According to the National Fire Protection Association, nearly 300,000 fires are intentionally set each year in the United States. There is no data for Canada.