9
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.
—Macbeth, act IV, scene 1
With the wind clocking steadily toward the southwest, and crossover well under way, Fire 009 was in the process of introducing the residents of Fort McMurray to the new reality of twenty-first-century fire. It is one thing for the temperature on a given day to nudge into record territory, it is quite another to break the standing record by nearly 10°F. Meanwhile, the relative humidity was dropping into the low teens. The hottest hours of the day were still to come, and there would be many of them: sunset wasn’t until after 9:00 p.m. The disconnect between the reality of this fire—its objective potential based on the physics and chemistry in play that day—and the leadership’s estimation of it had less to do with information or attitude than with vision. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. Senate’s 9/11 Commission Report declared, “The most important failure was one of imagination.” This conclusion could be applied just as easily to the financial crash of 2008, the election of Donald Trump, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or Odysseus’s Trojan Horse trick—any number of accidents, catastrophes, victories, and defeats.
Depending on conditions, wildfires may move as slowly as hurricanes, but they can also appear or accelerate with explosive suddenness—arriving in a community at flash-flood speed. The difference is that, while floods generally follow rivers, and hurricanes follow weather patterns in specific parts of the ocean, fire can occur anywhere there’s fuel, and fire’s menu is astonishingly broad, including virtually everything under the sun save dirt, rock, metal, and water. Furthermore, the paths fire takes are determined almost exclusively by the wind, which can blow in any direction. In this sense, fire is the most versatile and whimsical of disasters. Able to self-generate from a single spark, explode like a bomb, turn on a dime, and fly over obstacles, fire possesses an unparalleled capacity for random movement and rapid growth—qualities that make it particularly difficult to anticipate and respond to at the municipal level. Because of this, and perhaps because of their successful young city’s innate sense of invincibility, the citizenry of Fort McMurray discovered that their city was burning mostly by personal observation and word of mouth.
While Bernie Schmitte was on the air acting as an impromptu information officer, he could not be in regular contact with his agency’s shortwave radio channel. Jamie and Ryan Coutts, however, had been monitoring it all morning on their four-hour drive up from Slave Lake, and the scenario they heard unfolding wasn’t jibing with the information coming out of Fort McMurray. “We’re streaming the press conference in the truck,” Jamie Coutts recalled. “We listened to Darby Allen, and he’s like, ‘If you’re going to school, go to school. If you’re going to baseball, go to baseball. Go about your normal business and we’ll let you know.’ Then, about an hour from the city, we’re like, ‘That guy’s fucked, man.’ We had the Forestry channel on and we could hear them call it ‘past resources.’ So we’re driving in there completely in the know, because we have the right radio channel, we have the right knowledge, we know how this works. Those guys are sitting up in the REOC [at Fire Hall 5], asking us if we want a fucking tour.”
Jamie had earned the right to say this because, as a fellow fire chief—one who had seen his own town burn—he had paid his dues. He understood, perhaps better than anyone else in the country, the bind Allen was in, and the price he and his city stood to pay. The most extreme designation for a wildfire is “past resources.” Also referred to as “beyond resources,” the term means that not only is the fire out of control, it is actively unsafe to be in its vicinity. “It’s pretty much the worst thing you can hear,” Ryan Coutts told me. “It means there’s nothing Forestry can do.”
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—a time when bombers don’t fly and ground crews rarely work. “Beyond resources” is not an uncommon call to make on an aggressive wildfire in a remote area, but it has dire implications when there’s a city in the way.
Mark Stephenson, a firefighter and acting captain with the Fort McMurray Fire Department, saw it coming, but like so many on the municipal side, he didn’t fully grasp the implications—either for his city or for his own home. Stephenson lives up in Abasand, so he’d known this fire for days. A dedicated father, husband, churchgoer, and former serviceman, he hunts and traps, and back then, when he had the time, he looked after a vintage muscle car waiting out the winter in his garage. That spring, most of his free time had been taken up by home renovations. On Saturday, April 30, the day before Fire 009 was discovered, Stephenson recalled standing on his back porch with his five-year-old son, watching the bombers angling in for their drops on another nearby fire—so close that they could see the pilot’s head in the cockpit. A lot of wild things come close in Fort McMurray: Stephenson has seen wolves out his kitchen window. Downtown, in the springtime, you can stand in the Walmart parking lot and watch bear cubs in the poplar trees across the Clearwater River. They look like small, black-furred men as they climb unnervingly high into the treetops while their mothers pace back and forth below.
Stephenson—bearded, sized and sculpted like a gladiator—seems built for life on another scale: too big for his chair, too big for the coffee in his hand, too big for his extra-large T-shirt. Even in quiet conversation, he exudes a kinetic potential that seems ideally suited to the unreasonable demands life can sometimes impose on a person. This, after all, is someone who, finding himself with no keys and needing to get into his locked garage, kicked the door down—not the side door, the metal front door. At 12:30 p.m. on May 3, this was still in the future, but only just.
Stephenson happened to be at the Slave Lake crew’s sprinkler demo, which was held at Fire Hall 5, where the REOC had been set up. You could see why they wanted to offer a tour: Hall 5 is a brand-new, state-of-the-art, LEED-certified facility so swank it could pass for a modern art museum. Attending the demo along with Stephenson and a training supervisor named Dave Tovey were about twenty-five firefighters, many of whom were new recruits, or “probies,” firefighters still on probation. In truth, most of a municipal firefighter’s career is spent training, getting ready, and being ready. There is little actual firefighting. As one frustrated firefighter said of working at the airport, “It’s just a hell of a lot of polishing.” In the fire hall, you might hear this joke about how firefighters occupy their considerable downtime: “Eat till you’re tired; sleep till you’re hungry.” But municipal firefighters serve the city in many other ways; in Fort McMurray, they attend a disproportionate number of motor vehicle accidents.
While Forestry’s wildfire crews can now be fighting fires in March or earlier, and begging for mercy by August when there’s still a good two months of fire season to go, the Fort McMurray Fire Department might attend three or four structure fires a year—across the entire city. In light of this, one could be forgiven for wondering if, somewhere back in bookkeeping, they got the salaries reversed. Prior to May 3, there were city firefighters with ten years in who had never been on duty for an active house fire. Perhaps it’s no wonder that they could behold that black and angry roil churning the air above the treetops—just beyond the highway now—and have no idea what lay in store for them. Perhaps this is why, even when it was clear to Jamie and Ryan Coutts that Centennial Park and Beacon Hill were in imminent danger of being overrun by fire, officials at Hall 5 were trying to send the Slave Lake crew—battle-hardened boreal warriors with proven skills and methods—back home.
The sprinkler demo didn’t last long. At 12:30, just as Bernie Schmitte was leaving Mix 103’s downtown office, Acting Captain Stephenson was looking westward from the Hall 5 parking lot and seeing the same sight that had shocked Shandra Linder, and that had confirmed the Couttses’ worst fears. “We were looking down Airport Road towards the dump and you could see the fire walking towards the city,” Stephenson recalled. “It was like [the 1998 film] Armageddon—you know, when you see the asteroid come in and, all of the sudden, there’s a new fire plume—every couple minutes there’s a new plume—getting closer and closer to the city.”
Stephenson found this alarming, but not nearly as alarming as what came out of the mouth of the stranger standing next to him. “I just happened to be standing next to one of the Slave Lake guys, and he looked me straight in the face and said, ‘You guys are losing part of your city today.’ ”
Stephenson wanted to be clear on this point: “It was not like, ‘Yeah, you guys could.’ It was, ‘No, you are losing part of your town today.’ Just from experience, he knew.”
Whether they wanted it or not, the Slave Lake crew got their tour.
The Regional Emergency Operations Centre had been set up in a high-tech conference room on the second floor of Hall 5. Packed into it, in addition to Darby Allen and the recently arrived Bernie Schmitte, were dozens of people in color-coded vests representing various city and provincial services and agencies, ranging from electricity and gas to law enforcement and Alberta Emergency Management. “So, we went inside,” Jamie Coutts recalled, “and a deputy took us down to one of the windows at the end, and he’s showing us: ‘This is Beacon Hill and that one down there is Waterways, and over here is Abasand,’ and we’re watching this smoke column right over the top. Finally, I said, ‘I gotta go.’ So I left those guys standing there and I walked right into the REOC, and I’m like, ‘You know what, guys? I’m watching this smoke column; we gotta get going with these sprinklers. We have to do this right now. It can’t wait.’ ”
As the smoke column grew steadily darker and higher, taking up more and more of the western sky, it became clear to just about everyone present that urgent action was needed. Crews and equipment were then dispatched to Beacon Hill, along with Slave Lake’s sprinkler trailer.
Before Jamie followed them, he had a moment alone with his fellow fire chief. “I told Darby Allen right in the parking lot, ‘You’re an idiot no matter what. If you evacuate everybody and nothing happens, you’re an idiot. If you don’t evacuate everybody and the fire comes, you’re an idiot. You’re going to be wrong and everybody’s going to hate you no matter what, so follow your gut. If your gut says, ‘We need to get people out of here,’ then get them out of there. If the fire doesn’t come, then, whatever—no matter what call you make, and no matter when you make it, everybody else is smarter. Everyone else would have figured it out before you. Everyone else would have done it different than you. Doesn’t matter. When you’re the guy that’s in charge, you just do what you know is the best in protecting people and you roll with that. That’s the job. The job is to do what’s right for people regardless of what the people think.’ ”
Then, Jamie jumped in a truck with some probies and raced up the highway to Hall 1, just behind his son, Ryan, and Lieutenant Patrick McConnell.
By 1:00 p.m. there was serious discussion in the REOC of evacuating Beacon Hill, Abasand, and Thickwood, north of the golf course. It was a big decision with many considerations to weigh. Many of those involved didn’t know each other—at least not well—because assembling a REOC is a response to crisis, which was, thankfully, an uncommon event. It was a room full of alphas, all leaders in their respective domains. While there were some women present, there was a lot of testosterone in the room, along with mounting fear.
The Gordian network of intertwined systems that make up a city is truly daunting. Initiating an evacuation, even from a portion of Fort McMurray, would disrupt many thousands of people—everyone in that area from newborn infants and senile grandparents to pets and belligerent drunks. Complicating matters was the fact that most people were at work or in school. How do you get the message to them? How do you handle their emotions? What if they insist on going home? What if they refuse to leave? What if there’s an accident at a crucial intersection? If you shut down gas and electricity, what are the implications? What about the hospital—should you use vans or medevac? What about looters? And law enforcement? There were men in jail and women in childbirth; there were supermarkets full of perishable food, and perishable customers; there was a pet store, an animal shelter, and tanks of live lobsters.
A large evacuation, mismanaged, could create its own disaster.
The fire wasn’t the only elephant in the room that afternoon; the bitumen industry was another. The tension between the two put Darby Allen, the public face of public safety, in an almost impossible position. Leaders in any community are duty-bound to acknowledge possible disruptions, but disruption is a touchy subject in a place that lives or dies by global oil prices and the skittish whims of investors, many of whom are based offshore. After all, the world is big, there’s still a lot of flowing oil in it, and the challenges posed by bitumen are many and daunting. It did not help that the market was experiencing a glut in supply that had sent synthetic crude prices tumbling to $16 a barrel that winter before rebounding to a still-anemic $30 in late April. Thirty dollars a barrel was well below the break-even rate for bitumen upgrading; new projects were being shelved, and more layoffs were imminent. So close on the heels of this bearish news, no investor or CEO was going to want to hear about a shutdown due to fire.
Because these operations are so large and complex, and because they involve such volatile and toxic substances, such extraordinary sums of money, and so much manpower, interruptions of any kind—personal or mechanical—have serious, potentially career-ending, consequences. Syncrude, one of the smaller companies in the area, employs more than five thousand people and produces roughly 300,000 barrels of synthetic crude per day. Any one of these factors would make an official think twice before calling for a major evacuation. Considering the financial implications alone, there were, literally, millions of incentives to maintain the status quo, to keep calm and carry on.
This was a lot to bear, and Darby Allen wasn’t Winston Churchill, nor was he a charismatic captain of industry; he was a British-Canadian fire chief a year away from retirement whose midsized town had ballooned into a city, now threatened by one of the biggest urban catastrophes in modern times. What the chief had going for him was a frank and open countenance that had been visible in Fort McMurray long enough to become known and trusted by the people around and under him. But even though Allen was surrounded by some experienced crisis managers in the REOC, none of them had dealt with a threat of this magnitude, or immediacy, in any form.
The Global TV reporter Reid Fiest’s experience resembles thousands of others over that hour. He was editing a local news story in a borrowed office on the western edge of Beacon Hill when “someone came banging on the door and said, ‘You need to come out and see this!’ When we had gone in, about noon,” Fiest recalled, “there was smoke in the air, but nothing overwhelming. When we walked out [around 1:30], it was huge—a huge plume of black smoke.”
Even with this abundant evidence—on a day notable for its unseasonable heat, and with the memory of Slave Lake clear in his mind—Fiest still observed this fire from behind a bulwark of incredulity. It was a common theme in people’s responses that day—perhaps because this new possibility was simply too huge and disruptive to assimilate. Fiest, situated as he was, had a front-row seat to a fire that was now approaching as inexorably, and as quickly, as a storm. “That’s when I realized this is potentially the worst-case scenario,” he told me, “but I didn’t quite believe it yet. I had never been in a situation like that.” Fiest’s uncertainty didn’t last long: “Over the next twenty minutes, you could see it growing, you could really hear the wind changing, and we began to see the embers falling on the grass and on the trees. That’s what really triggered me to the fact this was going to spark a massive fire. That’s when I phoned my desk and said, ‘I think you need a story from us…because I think the worst case is about to become reality.’ ”
There are sights and sounds—frequencies of perception—that are instinctively wrong, that tap into our primal, animal sensibility and tell us it’s time to go—now. It can be the tone in someone’s voice, or the pitch in a gust of wind; it can be a screech of tires, the lurch of an airplane, or a sudden movement by a stranger; it can be the size, color, and proximity of a smoke plume. In none of these situations is there an established threshold, or fixed redline. Instead, there is a kind of subjective, sensory equivalent to crossover—a moment beyond which we are moved involuntarily to a state of high alert—and this moment seems to be the same for the majority of people. In Fort McMurray, starting around 12:30, this threshold was being crossed by everyone who looked at the southern sky.
At this point, most of the city’s residents were still at work, or at lunch, and their children were still in school. But that was about to change, and it would do so like the moment of arrival in a sci-fi movie, or in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds: people stopped in their tracks, heads turned to the sky, beholding something whose size and import they could neither limn nor scale. It wasn’t Martians, or Godzilla, but it was a monster and they knew it.
The firefighter Evan Crofford was off duty that day, at his home in Beacon Hill. “All of a sudden there’s a big plume of smoke behind me on my back deck and I thought, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I thought it would maybe come to the city limits and we’d get spots here and there. I never thought it would hit us with that much force.”
“When I got in the shower, the sky was blue,” a west side resident named Sandra Hickey recalled. “When I got out, the sky was black.”
The city’s schools were filled with children, some of whom, no doubt, were staring southward from playgrounds and classrooms at the place where the sky should have been. At the St. Martha Elementary School, a good seven miles north of the fire, firefighter Ryan Pitchers was in the midst of showing his pumper truck to a class of kindergarteners, and, even from that distance, he was alarmed by what he saw. A photo he took at 1:22 shows what appears to be an enormous storm cloud bearing down on the city. No evacuation notice had been issued. “The teachers asked us, ‘What should we do?’ ” Pitchers recalled. “I suggested, ‘Get ahold of the parents and be ready to go.’ ”
The kindergarten visit was over.
With crossover now complete, the fire would be setting the agenda for what was to come. Minutes later, Pitchers’s crew and their pumper truck redeployed to the Dickinsfield neighborhood in Thickwood, three miles south, and that much closer to the spot fire that had jumped the Athabasca River. The fire that Bernie Schmitte had described that morning as a minor fire worthy of a ten-man deployment was now unrecognizable. Before joining the fire department, Pitchers had done a tour in Bosnia as an infantryman, and he drew on that vocabulary to describe what he saw coming at him out of the forest: “That’s tighter than a duck’s ass pucker factor right there.”
Looming over the city now was a towering black cloud shot through with streaks of orange and seething with flames. Somewhere behind it, lost to view, was the sun. Directly in front of it were thousands of homes and dozens of schools. Now a fully developed Rank 6 crown fire, its kilotons of energy were generating internal winds approaching gale force. There was no longer any question of whether or not it was coming into town. Very few people have stood downwind of a Rank 6 boreal wildfire. Now, tens of thousands of people were in that position, caught by surprise in the middle of their daily lives. The shock was palpable and traumatizing.
All morning, time had been moving in a peculiar way, but this is the nature of Nature on a deadline: things unfolding gradually across the intersecting horizons of landscape and time until that moment when, with astonishing suddenness, they merge and the event is upon you. You wonder where all the time has gone, when in fact it hasn’t gone anywhere, it is the events within it that have appeared to amplify in speed and scale—because they now include you. This is one of the supreme challenges facing humans in how we manage the physical reality of our planet: the deceptively simple tension between time, rate, and distance. A hurricane can be plotted and tracked a week out, where it remains an abstraction on a network weather map, and yet when it is upon you, time and events achieve a kind of singularity and, suddenly, nothing else exists; its immediacy—its presence—is overwhelming.
There are literally thousands of cell phone photos and videos from this moment of collective anagnorisis in Fort McMurray, and they all show the same thing, just from slightly different angles—the post office steps on Hardin, the parking lot of the Showgirls nightclub on Franklin, downtown office windows, drive-through lineups, and back porches in Abasand, Beacon Hill, and Thickwood. It’s a huge and overbearing presence blocking out what, half an hour earlier, had been a picture-perfect Alberta sky.
The prevailing southwesterly was being further energized, and also confused, not only by the fire’s self-generated thermals but also by a third wind source, what meteorologists call a “low-level jet.” This is, essentially, a localized jet stream directly influenced by regional weather conditions. Occurring a thousand feet or more above the ground, and blowing anywhere from forty to more than one hundred miles per hour, a low-level jet can generate tremendous turbulence inside a fire’s smoke column. If it persists, it can have a dramatic effect, not only on the plume’s behavior but also on the fire’s. A steady injection of the jet’s energy (and oxygen) can hasten and amplify a fire’s transition from a largely forest-level event to a meteorological one, a full-blown weather system that, like a hurricane, comes with its own engine (the burning forest). Hurricanes are energized by warm seawater and tend to collapse when they hit land; in the case of a boreal fire, only a weather shift, a great lake, or an ocean can stop it. It gives a whole new meaning to the poet Andrew Marvell’s line, “Had we but world enough and time.” Boreal fires have both. The wind was now blowing toward the northeast; in that direction lay unlimited fuel from Fort McMurray to Hudson’s Bay, seven hundred miles away. With a good five months left of fire season, this fire could, in theory, burn from the heart of the country all the way to the sea.
At the moment, with not one but three different wind sources energizing it, the fire was poised to overrun Beacon Hill and Abasand. Nearly ten thousand people lived up there between schools, shops, churches, and even a gas station. For vehicles, there was only a single access road to each of those neighborhoods, but for the fire, there were no such limitations. In this way, the topography of Fort McMurray was perfectly suited to fire’s most basic aspiration: to eagerly follow heat and volatile gases, both of which are compelled upward at every opportunity. In wintertime, the steep banks of the Hangingstone River funnel sound like a bullhorn, but in the heat of this freakishly warm spring day, they funneled wind like a bellows, supercharging the flames with invigorating gusts of preheated oxygen, driving it up the thickly forested slopes and onto the hilltops. With the low-level jet injecting more air and oxygen from above, the effect, directly over those neighborhoods, was like a huge convection oven—a convection oven set to a thousand degrees, and filled with shoeboxes.