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The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
—Albert Allen Bartlett, physicist
Even though its purpose was to alert and inform, the 11:00 a.m. press conference seemed to have the opposite effect; a crucial sense of urgency was missing. Reid Fiest, the journalist who had pressed Bernie Schmitte on the fire’s containment, was an early casualty of this muted sense of alarm. Fiest (pronounced feist) had flown up from Calgary with his cameraman on May 2 in response to the partial evacuations announced on May 1. “We saw stories like Slave Lake,” he said, “and I remember thinking how quickly that evolved, so I thought we should be up there in case something bad happened.”
Fiest’s instincts were good, but as soon as he heard evacuation orders being rescinded, he second-guessed his decision to come, and his doubts persisted. “When I left that news conference, I wasn’t clear what could happen that afternoon. I didn’t feel the threat.” When Fiest discussed it with colleagues at the head office in Vancouver, they agreed it was a “non-story.” “At that point [around noon],” he said, “my desk didn’t feel it would meet the threshold for a national story.”
While the Fire Weather Index for May 3 may have been a first, the possibility of a high-intensity wildfire confronting Fort McMurray was not. It is, after all, in the nature of large boreal fires to sweep across landscapes in response to wind, heat, and low humidity. Like the direct hits by Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Maria, and Ian, it was not a matter of if a major fire would arrive at the gates of Fort McMurray, but when. In 1995, the Mariana Lake Fire burned 500 square miles of timber south of town, closing Highway 63 and coming close enough to prompt the construction of extensive firebreaks. In 2009, the highway was closed by fire again. In 2011, the Richardson Fire, an epic blaze, burned 2,600 square miles of forest north of Fort McMurray, forcing the shutdown of two major bitumen plants, and resulting in mass evacuations, damaged infrastructure, and claimed losses of more than half a billion dollars. Sandwiched between these swaths of charred timber and muskeg lay the rapidly growing city of Fort McMurray and its satellite communities, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of mature forest that hadn’t seen a major fire in eighty years.
Natural disasters may be hard to schedule, but a fire in the boreal is as certain as death: any given tree in the boreal forest can expect to burn once in a century, give or take fifty years. Fire is the principal mechanism by which the boreal forest purges and regenerates itself, to the point that the cones of several keystone conifer species, including black spruce, will not drop their seeds unless they are heated to temperatures unachievable by sunlight alone. Not only do these blasts of intense heat open the cones, releasing the seeds inside, they also indicate that fire has cleared the ground below and opened the canopy above, thus improving the odds of those seeds’ successful germination. Without fire and its seemingly random but ultimately regular patterns of return, the boreal forest would collapse. There is in this cycle a kind of codependency that, when viewed from the point of view of fire, upends the notion of what a forest is, and whom it serves. As the naturalist and author David Pitt-Brooke wrote of a similar forest farther south, “Fire-spawned stands of lodgepole pine are, in a sense, locked into a fire cycle. They are creations of fire and, in turn, they create conditions hospitable to future fire. You could almost think of it as a symbiosis…a form of farming: fire creates these stands of lodgepole pine so it can eat them later.”
But humans and their settlements live and grow by different means and rhythms than forests and fires. The decadal and centennial cycles shaping the boreal forest are rarely considered by city planners or elected officials, not only because their terms (not to mention their memories and lives) are too short, but also because their knowledge of this colonized landscape is incomplete. Virtually everyone who came here to settle this country arrived from far away, often from very different environments. To this day, most newcomers are focused less on the landscape than on what they can take from it. In northern Alberta, the majority of these colonists don’t stay long, remaining for only a fraction of a spruce tree’s life-span. Most are laid off, if they don’t burn out first. There are exceptions, but even longtime residents have an exit plan, and being buried in Fort McMurray is not one of them. This explains why the mortality rate is significantly lower here than the rest of Alberta (though cancer rates are higher). Retirees who don’t return to their hometowns take their winnings to warmer places like Florida, Arizona, Southern California, British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, or the coastal islands. Some older Suncor executives followed J. Howard Pew back to Pennsylvania.
In Fort McMurray, as in so many resource towns that live and die by global market prices, ten years can be a career. Most booms and busts play out in half that time, and Fort Mac has weathered a few. In part due to diligent fire suppression and prevention, and in part due to chance, Fort McMurray had managed to subvert the laws of Nature for decades. Whatever fires it hadn’t been lucky enough to dodge it had managed to deflect. But 2016 represented a kind of synchronous convergence. In 2015, itself a record-breaking year for fire, an unseasonably warm and early spring had been amplified by an exceptionally strong El Niño, which lingered on through the year, raising winter temperatures and reducing the snowpack in northern Alberta by more than half. So dry was the forest that in December and January, when the boreal forest is normally bound up tight in snow and sub-zero temperatures, five human-caused wildfires were reported.
Even without the added liability of a South Pacific weather system, May is still the cruelest month in Alberta. Over the past twenty years, nearly half of the total area burned by wildfires here has ignited during the month of May, and for a specific reason. In most of the circumboreal, this is when winter snow cover finally gives way to spring’s lengthening days and the resurgent flush of leaves and grasses. During this transition, however, there is a critical moment when, with no snow left to cover it, and no foliage yet to shade it, the normally damp, dark forest floor is exposed to the novelty of direct sunlight. This period of a week or two, which occurs before the trees’ roots have fully thawed and their branches have budded, has a name—the “spring dip.” During this brief window of time, between the river’s break-up and the forest’s green-up, trees—coniferous and deciduous alike—are exceptionally vulnerable to fire. Under these conditions, leaves, cones, and deadfall take on the characteristics of kindling, and last summer’s grass will burn like newspaper. In 2016, the spring dip lined up perfectly with Fire 009.
There are formulas and computer programs that can accurately process all these variables, and thereby predict a particular fire’s intensity and rate of spread. One of these programs is called Prometheus, and it was being applied to this fire. But as accurate as it was, it would have no bearing on the outcome in human terms. All the choices made that day were based on sophisticated weather data and live observations filtered through the minds and actions of human beings. Significant here is the fact that programs like Prometheus are designed for use in forests—with trees. No one truly knew what formidable synergy all of these accumulated influences might unleash in a residential setting. It raised a dreadful question: What happens when all the numbers come up at once? What might be released? That morning, it was as if Fort McMurray, with its eighty-year jackpot rollover of unburned trees, and its half-century bonanza of vinyl-sided, tar-shingled plywood houses, had won the lotto for flammability—all six numbers in exact order, plus the El Niño bonus and the spring dip mega ball. The payout for a long shot like that would be in the billions.
The manner in which Mix 103’s Chris Vandenbreekel was awakened to the risk this fire posed was probably unique among the citizenry of Fort McMurray. In fact, the next hour in the working life of this young journalist would unfold much like Orson Welles’s radio play War of the Worlds. Immediately following the press conference at city hall, Vandenbreekel persuaded the wildfire manager, Bernie Schmitte, to join him on his noon-hour radio show, Fort McMurray Matters. It was a short walk across the street to Mix 103’s offices, which were located in a low storefront on the east side of Franklin Avenue at the corner of Hardin Street. Franklin runs on a north-south axis through the heart of downtown, following the floodplain of the Clearwater River, which joins the Athabasca less than a mile downstream (north), just beyond the sprawling rec center at MacDonald Island.
The downtown core, known as Lower Townsite, was originally laid out to serve barge traffic, fish and fur traders, and a few hundred hardy residents along this still remote stretch of river. Today, Lower Townsite is about a mile long and five blocks wide. There is more to it than meets the eye: together with its government buildings, churches, pocket malls, restaurants, big-box stores, strip club, and mosque, it supports a halal butcher and a continental market that carries everything from fezzes and Korans to fufu flour, manioc, and three-legged cast iron potjies from South Africa. Just up Franklin from Mix 103 is Chow’s Varieties, a general store with a stock ranging from candy and hockey memorabilia to cigar humidors and fishing gear. It also carries hundreds of magazines, making it one of the most comprehensive sources of print journalism and comics in the country.[*1] Flanking Franklin on both sides are residential streets occupied by some of the bitumen industry’s first permanent employee housing. Just as many cities have Irish, Polish, or Chinese neighborhoods, Fort McMurray’s first communities were affiliated with particular companies, principally Suncor and Syncrude. Throughout all the city’s changes, Franklin Avenue, named for the doomed explorer Sir John Franklin, has remained the spine of downtown. To this day, both ends are dead ends.
Vandenbreekel’s studio window at Mix 103 was plainly visible to passersby, and it offered anyone inside a clear view to the west, across Franklin and down Hardin Street, past the Boomtown Casino, the Peter Pond Mall, the post office, and Tim Hortons—all the way to the mud-spattered chrome and muted roar of truck traffic that hurtles up and down Highway 63 twenty-four hours a day. On the far side of the highway, an easy potato gunshot from the radio station, is Abasand Hill, a steep, forested ridge that runs parallel to the highway for about a mile before its north end drops away precipitously into the Athabasca River as it loops in from the southwest. There, along Abasand’s steep western face, bands of bituminous sand are visible; in the unseasonable heat of the past several days, they had been weeping raw bitumen that glistened like liquid obsidian.
This tapering convergence of Abasand Hill, the Athabasca River, and the low floodplain of downtown appears, from above, to be stapled together by three parallel highway bridges comprising ten lanes and built to bear the million-pound loads of mining and upgrading equipment required by the bitumen industry. This is the only way to reach the strip mines, tailings ponds, and upgrading plants north of town. It also offers the only road access to the densely packed neighborhoods of the west side, where two-thirds of Fort McMurray’s population now lives. The south end of Abasand Hill is marked by another steep descent, this time into the Hangingstone River, a narrow tributary of the Clearwater. Rising up from the far bank of the Hangingstone, due south of Abasand, is Beacon Hill, another ridgetop neighborhood. Up on these breezy, park-like plateaus, thousands of bitumen workers have raised their children, and even been raised themselves, in a subarctic approximation of the suburban ideal. From these tree-lined heights, residents had, through a screen of leafless spring forest, a disconcertingly good view of the fire.
Downtown on Franklin, through Mix 103’s storefront window, Schmitte and Vandenbreekel had an equally good view of Beacon Hill and Abasand, and the smoke now rising up directly behind them. After a brief introduction, Vandenbreekel jumped right in: “It’s been a tough slog for you guys over the past few days with all these wildfires around,” he began. “Of course, this massive one”—he glanced out the window—“we can see the smoke starting to pop up again here.”
By now, the smoke-suppressing inversion had lifted, and the inverse gap between temperature and relative humidity was widening by the minute. Thus liberated and empowered, the fire had begun to burn in earnest, preparing to pick up where it had left off late the previous evening. As the smoke plume billowed higher in the shifting airs over Abasand and Beacon Hill, and Schmitte elaborated on information he had covered in the press conference, there was, in his lucid, thorough, and media-friendly delivery, a sense of events being experienced in the third person. At seven minutes past noon, nestled inside Schmitte’s aura of dispassionate calm, the worst scenario Vandenbreekel could envision was “Maybe it’ll get close enough to Centennial Park that it’ll burn a trailer or two.”
This was about the time Jamie and Ryan Coutts rolled into Fire Hall 5 with the sprinkler trailer. Hall 5 is located off the highway on Airport Road, five miles south of downtown. It is positioned on a low hilltop that offers an excellent view in all directions. When Jamie looked to the west, his worst fears were confirmed. At the 11:00 a.m. conference, Schmitte had described the fire’s new forward operating base on the north side of the Athabasca River as being about twelve acres in size, and he had explained that ten firefighters were en route. But that was old news. While it might have been true at ten or eleven, it was now past noon, a long time in the life of this kind of fire, one that was currently in the midst of a pivotal transition plainly visible through the radio station window. At about 12:15, Vandenbreekel said, “Looking out here in front of the Mix office at Franklin and Hardin, we can see that column really getting up today, and this is what you predicted at the press conference—that, just past noon, this fire was going to explode up again and crown. When the smoke goes up like that, is it a signal to the city that there is more danger?”
Schmitte demurred—he was a wildfire manager, not a safety officer. “As the intensity starts to increase,” he said, “then you start to see a change in the column. A white column means that the fire intensity is not real high; a black column means that there is extreme fire behavior.”
“So, what we’re seeing right now,” Vandenbreekel said, “is a little bit of a mix—kind of a brown with a little bit of white on the edges. So, what would you say the intensity of this is right now?”
“We’re getting up into what we would call a Rank 4 fire—intense surface fire,” Schmitte said. “You’re also going to see some full-tree candling and some intermittent torching. Once the column turns black, then it’s a full crown fire—the entire tree is being consumed by flames.”
“Within a few minutes of him saying that,” Vandenbreekel told me, “the smoke is turning blacker and blacker. I can see Bernie glancing at it, and he’s starting to sweat.”
What Schmitte and Vandenbreekel were witnessing out the window—live, on the radio—was a moment similar to the one in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey when Hal, the spaceship’s AI computer, becomes self-aware and takes over the ship. In firefighting parlance, this moment is known as “crossover.” For a wildfire, and everything in its path, it represents a point of no return.
Fire, like virtually every living thing, is solar-powered: like us, it wakes and sleeps on a diurnal cycle, and, like the plants it feeds on, it gains and loses energy in direct relation to the sun’s presence and strength. Because of this, there is, in the daily life of a forest fire, an arc it traces—a kind of circadian rhythm that takes its cues from the sun, the mother of all fires. Wildfires tend to lie low at night and wake up in the morning, lifting their heads as the sun rises and opening up, flower-like, as the dew evaporates, the humidity drops, and the temperature rises. The warming air and earth in turn generate breezes, particularly in hilly terrain like that along the Athabasca River, where the warmer, sunlit hilltops draw cooler air upward out of the shaded river valleys. As the air heats “up,” something must fill the void below, and this process of atmospheric in-filling is what we call wind. The temptation to think of wind as being blown or pushed across a landscape is a holdover from ancient times: Aristotle thought this, too. But wind is drawn across a landscape, and it is inhaled by fire.
When a wildfire is burning in optimal fire weather, there is a moment when what once took effort becomes almost effortless—when, like Hal the AI computer, the fire says, in effect, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here.” Instead of burning in spite of its environment—wet wood, cool temperatures, the dead, smothering air of an inversion—the environment becomes an ally attending to the fire’s every need: high temperatures, low humidity, dry fuel, and wind. Crossover is truly a crux in the day for fire and firefighter alike, and it is predictable almost to the minute. Technically speaking, crossover occurs when the ambient temperature in degrees Celsius exceeds the relative humidity as a percentage. A common example would be when the air temperature rises above 26°C—roughly 80°F—and the relative humidity drops below 26 percent, which is already kindling dry. Typically, the winds will pick up under these conditions, at first due to the uneven heating of the landscape and later due to the increased energy generated by the fire itself. The effect on a fire is dramatic—roughly analogous to a motorboat attaining sufficient speed to transition from pushing through the water to skimming over it.
Once crossover is achieved, the fire is set free, able to move and grow exponentially faster and with far more agility. As the gap between temperature and humidity widens and the attendant winds build, it’s like throttling up on a motorboat, only on a geographic scale. Crossover is what enables a fire to escape its natal valley, prairie, or forest block and take over a landscape, along with everything on it, in one hot, dry, windy afternoon. It can happen with startling speed, and once it does, the fire, which just a few hours earlier may have been smoldering in place, or plodding through leaves and underbrush at a slow walk, becomes a juggernaut, sometimes hundreds of feet tall, and moving like the wind. With so much less work to do in the form of drying and preheating fuel, and aided by the oxygen rush of a rising wind, the fire can now devote its full combustive energy to consumption and growth. If unregulated free market capitalism were a chemical reaction, it would be a wildfire in crossover conditions. Alberta’s bitumen industry follows a similar growth pattern, with market forces standing in for weather.
The moment of crossover is easily identified by a fire’s ascent from the forest floor via so-called ladder fuels of bushes and low branches into the trees themselves. Once in the treetops, closer to the wind, the flames appear to leap improvisationally, almost lemur-like, from fuel to fuel, higher and higher into a forest’s architecture, until they are bounding through the treetops. This is a crown fire and, just as a troop of lemurs or gibbons line up their next jumps on the fly, the crown fire’s heat runs ahead of it in an anticipatory way, drawn forward by the wind, preheating unburned trees and releasing clouds of combustible gases in preparation for the next explosive ignition. In the case of a big boreal fire, thousands of these preheated ignitions will be occurring simultaneously across a front that may be several miles wide. As with the Chisholm Fire in 2001, the energy releasing at lunchtime on May 3 was equivalent to a nuclear explosion.
The effects are spectacular. Under these circumstances, what Bernie Schmitte described as “full-tree candling” will turn trees, almost instantly, into hundred-foot pillars of flame. With sufficient wind and heat this can happen to an entire line of trees simultaneously. Meanwhile, high above, wind, heat, and combustible gases combine in a terrible synergy that enables the fire to become airborne, not merely in the form of flying needles and embers, but as actual fireballs and spontaneous explosions that those in the business of wildfire call “dragons.” These Godzilla-sized and -shaped eruptions of combusting gas bursting from the crowns of superheated conifer trees can be three hundred feet high and are hot enough to reignite the smoke, soot, and embers above them, driving flames hundreds, even thousands, of feet higher into the smoke column.
The more extreme the crossover differential between high temperature and low humidity, the more rapidly the preheating and ignition are able to happen, and this can create a feedback loop—a spiral, really—of ever-increasing heat and wind. Once a crown fire like this is fully under way, it is unstoppable. As one civilian witness to the fire’s crossover on May 3 said, “There is no way a man is going to put this out.” The best one can hope for is to head it off with catguards, by bombing downwind fuels with water and retardant, or by lighting backfires in order to consume the future fuel supply. But, as the firefighters in Slave Lake learned so painfully in 2011, you can do all these things, but you can’t stop the flying embers. As light and mobile as a spore—or a virus—each spark has everything it needs to start an entirely new fire hundreds, even thousands, of yards downwind. In crossover conditions like those on May 3, each one of these fires would be fully capable of becoming as large and vigorous as the parent fire that disseminated it.
This kind of high-intensity crown fire, the same kind that had so impressed the residents of Beacon Hill, Abasand, and Thickwood the previous evening, is classified as Rank 6. This is the highest ranking for a wildfire, and, while the fact that Rank 6 crown fires can jump major rivers had been addressed by Schmitte, it was not done in a way that indicated what an ominous development this was. At about twenty minutes past noon, after a brief recap of firefighting personnel, Chris Vandenbreekel asked Schmitte which part of the fire posed the most immediate risk to the community: the eastern flank, which was less than a mile from the highway, the Centennial Campground, and the south end of town; the northern flank, which was pushing up against the Athabasca River, the backside of Beacon Hill, and Abasand; or the spot fire on the north side of the river, which threatened the west side neighborhoods. “It would be the northern flank,” Schmitte answered. “It’s quite a distance from Fort McMurray, but that portion of the fire hasn’t had any tanker activity on there. So, the plan today is to use the air tankers that we have and try to cool down that northern flank, and get the catguard in as well.” As for the spot fire threatening the golf course, Schmitte believed that his men had it well in hand. “We’re pretty confident,” he said. “We’re going to put everything we’ve got into containing that fire today.”
Just a few minutes later, at 12:23, Chief Allen issued the following message on Twitter: “Wherever you live in #ymm[*2] bear in mind that we’re in a serious situation. Get your kits ready.” It is unclear how many people actually saw this; it was retweeted only thirteen times.
That the Rank 4 fire Schmitte and Vandenbreekel were observing out the radio station window would shortly attain Rank 6—analogous to a Category 5 hurricane—was not a possibility but a certainty was a fact well understood by Schmitte and anyone familiar with fire weather in the boreal forest. In fact, it was happening at that very moment, literally, before their eyes. And yet, at twenty-five minutes past noon, Vandenbreekel was still trying to get a fix on the risk this fire posed. “What should Fort McMurray–ites be doing,” he asked, “to prepare for eventualities with this forest fire?”
“I’ll just reiterate what Chief Allen stated at the press conference,” Schmitte said. “People should carry on their normal day, and also be prepared.”
This advice, paraphrasing the British wartime slogan “Keep calm and carry on,” taps deeply into Canadian national virtues, which favor “Peace, Order, and Good Government” over “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As reassuring as these words were, by lunchtime on May 3 they had become a hollow prayer, and perhaps something far more dangerous.
With the humidity dropping and the temperature rising, a fire that had already been burning out of control for two days and nights was accelerating toward the fourth-largest city in Alberta, and it was doing so in record-setting conditions whose specifics had been detailed and refined over months, days, and now hours. But unless you were a wildland firefighter, a senior civic leader, or one of several hundred temporary evacuees from smaller weekend fires, you would have had only a passing awareness. That morning, the other 88,000 inhabitants of greater Fort McMurray were living in a parallel reality, as oblivious to their environment as the passengers on the Titanic were to theirs. Just as icebergs were clearly visible from the deck of that doomed ship, smoke plumes billowed over the green sea surrounding Fort McMurray. For those who took note of them, they were an abstraction—a feature rather than a factor, worthy of an Instagram post but nothing more.
Scarcely an hour after he had asked it, Chris Vandenbreekel’s calm but earnest question about whether or not residents in Beacon Hill and Abasand should prepare for evacuation was already moot. Holding things together at this point, all across town, was the inertia of habit, decorum, and a disciplined workforce. And why not? The skies above were still clear, and most people were indoors anyway—at school, or work, or shopping, or else up at Site, thirty miles away. Even though it was understood that this fire was close by, that today would be hotter and drier than yesterday, that the forecast called for the winds to shift toward town, the citizens of Fort McMurray were going about their day as instructed. Even if Schmitte was sweating—and he had good reason to be—he sounded calm enough on the air, and that was all listeners had to go on, if indeed anyone was listening at all.
Meanwhile, the winds were making their predicted swing to the southwest, a development that would, as Schmitte told Vandenbreekel, “challenge that perimeter” along the northern flank. But there was nothing in his tone or inflection to indicate that the fire was going to challenge that perimeter exactly the same way it had “challenged” the Athabasca River the night before. Even Vandenbreekel, who had been tracking both the behavior of the fire and of Schmitte, took everything he’d heard at face value. His impression after the wildfire manager hustled out of the studio just before 12:30 was that Schmitte “truly believed they were going to be able to battle it back.”
Still feeling the symptoms of spring fever, Shandra Linder knocked off work at lunch and organized herself for a two o’clock meeting at Syncrude’s downtown office in the Borealis Building. With no traffic, it’s a thirty-minute drive back down the highway. Linder was meeting with Syncrude’s head of emergency response, not to discuss the fires currently burning around the town, but, rather, the more abstract danger of social unrest. Their longtime competitor, Suncor, was having serious union troubles, and there were ongoing threats posed by First Nations and environmental groups who, for years, have protested the social and environmental impacts of the industry. Should one of these entities decide to block Highway 63, it could threaten the safety and productivity of the mines and refineries to the north, all of which operate twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and require massive movements of personnel at every shift change.
It was around half past one when Linder descended Supertest Hill into the river valley. She had planned to do errands after the meeting; in the back of her car were reusable grocery bags (it was “Discount Tuesday”) and her dry cleaning. Still fifteen miles north of downtown, she was rounding a long, gradual bend in the river when her windshield filled with something she did not recognize. “When I got that first view of it,” Linder told me, “I went, ‘Hang on a second.’ It was clear overhead, but to the south it was black—black smoke with streaks of red in it. It took up the whole sky. I’m trying to make sense of this thing; I’m thinking maybe it just looks closer than it is; I’m thinking maybe the red is the sun shining through smoke. But it’s not the sun; it’s in the wrong place. And then I realize it’s flame.”
Linder had lived up here with her husband for two decades; together, they bought a house on a greenway and built a life. They had probably seen a hundred fire plumes, but this didn’t look like any of them. “So, I pull over to the side of the highway, and I call my guy, Byron, and I say, ‘Are we having this meeting?’ And he’s like, ‘No. We are not having this meeting. It’s not happening, don’t come in.’
“And I’m like, ‘I’m looking at a wall of flames here.’ ”
It was a short call, in part because no one was quite sure what to say next. What do you say on a beautiful spring day when the city where you live and conduct business appears to be on fire? After hanging up, Linder pulled back onto 63 and continued on to the Confederation exit, where she turned west, back up the hill and out of the river valley. “Okay,” she said, “not right, but here’s what I do—I’m going to go home anyway, I drive past the dry cleaners—well, I’m gonna drop off my stuff at Sam’s place ’cause in our minds the fire’s still on the other side of the river. So, I’m dropping my stuff off and while I’m standing there, a guy comes in from the golf course in full golf apparel, and he’s like, ‘Holy shit! We just got evacuated from the golf course!’ Now he’s at the dry cleaner and I’m like, ‘What are you doing here?’ And he says, ‘Well, I’m here to pick up my dry cleaning.’ I said, ‘What golf course were you on?’—because we only have two in town. He says, ‘Thickwood,’ meaning the fire has just jumped the river.
“So,” Linder continued, “Sam the dry cleaner, who’s our buddy, is like, ‘Whoah!’ And he’s on the phone to his wife: ‘Honey, it just jumped the river—get out, get out, get out!’ ’Cause they live in Wood Buffalo [neighborhood], which is right next to the river. In all this craziness, Sam still takes my stuff, logs it, and he’s like, ‘Tuesday good?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, next Tuesday’s great.’ ”
At two o’clock in the afternoon on May 3, Linder tucked her laundry ticket into her wallet and aimed her Porsche for home.
Disaster is, almost by definition, a kind of existential dissonance. For the individual, it is cognitive dissonance made manifest: a disruption to one’s personal and physical world order so profound that you don’t know where to file it, how to measure it, or even how to react—because you have no precedent, because it’s simply too big and violating to grasp. Shandra Linder’s job is demanding and complex; the stakes are high and she functions well in a crisis, but even though she had just visually and verbally acknowledged the presence of a catastrophic fire, and even confirmed it with others, she didn’t fully register what it meant, or how it might impact her. Because the fires she knew—that most people in Fort McMurray knew—were brown or gray, and always in the distance. This fire was none of those things; it was too big, too black, too red, too close.
As the minutes ticked by, the advisories being transmitted over local radio and Facebook Live grew increasingly out of phase—not only with the wildfire they were purporting to describe, but with the experience of those actually trying to fight it. Nearly a century ago, Hermann Hesse anticipated this modern dilemma in his existential novel Steppenwolf. At the end of the book, the protagonist encounters his idol, Mozart, who appears to him playing a primitive radio. “When you listen to wireless,” explains the long-dead composer, “you are a witness to the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.” In their attempts to use mass media to manage responses to an unmanageable—one could say “divine”—entity, Fort McMurray’s leadership fell victim to this “everlasting war,” and so did the quality of their information. Because radio, even in the hands of a live broadcaster, not only lacks the dynamic nuance of the event it is trying to describe, it is always a beat behind. As a mathematician named Aubrey Clayton wrote, “The problem with exponential growth is that it means most of the change is always in the recent past.” For this reason, any kind of update—any kind of news at all—is, by its nature, a kind of incomplete history: by the time one has gathered, organized, and relayed it, the world has moved on. But in most cases, the world doesn’t move as quickly as it did in Fort McMurray on May 3. On that day, the inertia of the present was overmatched by the impatience of the future.