14
We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.
—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message
As Wayne McGrath made his way off the hilltop in Abasand, followed by evacuating firefighters, he encountered the same horrific conditions that the Ayearsts and their neighbors were enduring a mile to the south in Beacon Hill. Videos taken by evacuating residents that afternoon look as if they were shot at midnight, inside tunnels of fire swirling with embers. The audio—screaming, swearing, praying, begging, and crying—is difficult to listen to. And so, in their way, are the long moments of stoic silence, broken only by the hum of the engine and the crackling of the fire outside.
It has been suggested that one reason so many of us are attracted to disaster movies—beyond voyeuristic catharsis—is because they offer ways to visualize, and perhaps prepare for, such events ourselves. By midafternoon, right about the time a lot of people in Fort McMurray start thinking about a Double Double at Tim Hortons, the city had become its own disaster movie, with a uniquely dissonant tempo—the astonishing swiftness of the fire’s progress set against the excruciating slowness of evacuating traffic. Whether it was figuring out how to reassure a panicking spouse or how to stop the next block from burning down, one way or another, everyone was improvising.
Combustive energy had drawn people to Fort McMurray in steadily increasing numbers over the course of a century, and combustive energy was driving them out again, en masse, in a single afternoon. As the people of Fort McMurray made their escape, it was through apocalyptic conditions that recalled the seventh plague in the Bible’s Book of Exodus: “So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous, such as there was none like it in all the land since Egypt became a nation.”
There was none like it since Canada became a nation, either: the exodus of May 3 was the largest, most rapid displacement of people due to fire in North American history. It took the form of an unbroken ribbon of vehicles crawling in ranks, like army ants, northward and southward out of the city while fire raged along the highway, in some cases right up to the breakdown lanes. Visible in every rearview mirror was a monstrous plume where their city should have been, as if the city itself had erupted. Many who saw this sight speculated that the entire city was lost. The fire plume, which was growing steadily larger, was actively changing the region’s meteorology. No longer simply a ground-level interface fire, it had become a force of Nature. As temperatures rose past 1,000°F, the air at the smoke column’s center rose ever more rapidly, driving upward, like smoke up a hot chimney. As this superheated air rose higher and faster, it created a vacuum into which cooler air was drawn from all sides at greater and greater velocity. Operating like a recirculating fountain, storm systems this large also generate powerful downdrafts along their outer edges, which, in the case of a wildfire, can cause it to burn even more intensely, like an atmospheric turbocharger.
Smoke columns behave like fountains in other ways, too: suffused within that swirling vortex, inconceivable in the face of so much fire, was a colossal amount of water—not just from moisture bound up in the forest, but also from melting ice, broken water lines, and fire hoses. In order for fuels to burn as explosively as they did in Fort McMurray, any residual moisture had to be removed by evaporation. All that water has to go somewhere, and it does: what looks from a distance like “smoke” is really a combination of soot, combustive gases, toxic chemicals, and steam. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water vapor were being carried skyward though the smoke column, ten, twenty, thirty thousand feet above the fire, where it condensed and then froze. There, miles above the city, hurricane-force downdrafts hurled fusillades of black hail back to earth, just as they had done in ancient Egypt. Reduced to their most elementary ingredients, these carbon-infused ice pellets were all that remained of the trees and houses so recently devoured by the fire.
As the fire intensified, ash and glowing spruce needles grew into firebrands the size of work boots, and then branches, treetops, fence panels, and entire garden sheds—all flying through the air, on fire. Some of these were carried thousands of feet into the smoke column, just as they would in a tornado. Pilots flying over large wildfires have reported charred tree branches bouncing off their windshields at twenty thousand feet. A photo taken from an airplane window late on the night of May 3 shows a vast and luminous smoke cloud where the city had been while, high above, the northern lights blaze across the sky. In another age, this might have been an omen worthy of formal record, but that night, it was just one more illumination from the twenty-first century, captured in this smartphone-crowdsourced record of apocalyptic visions.
Other anomalies appeared as well, and, from this vantage, they sound more like details from the Old Testament or Greek mythology than events reported from one of the twenty-first century’s wealthiest industrial centers. Among them was a fire-borne thunderhead. Known to meteorologists as a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb, these massive formations can be two hundred miles wide and reach into the stratosphere. A fully developed pyroCb, like the one shrouding Fort McMurray on May 3, is so huge and energetic that its behavior is influenced by the coriolus effect—the rotation of the earth. In the Northern Hemisphere this will cause such a system to spin counterclockwise, just like a hurricane. Because of their size, particularly their height, pyroCbs are Nature’s most efficient delivery system for high-altitude pollutants, including carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and vast amounts of carbon and other particulates. Once these smoke columns reach the lower stratosphere, between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet above the earth, the aerosols and particulates within them can be carried around the world on the jet stream, which circles the poles like a high-speed conveyor belt.
Breakthroughs in aerosol-sensing satellite technology have revolutionized scientists’ understanding of these phenomena. As recently as the 1990s, hemisphere-spanning aerosol clouds generated by enormous wildfires were mistakenly attributed to volcanic activity. In part because they were so rare, wildfire-generated pyroCbs have only been formally identified and studied as such since 1998, the dawn of this new era of twenty-first-century fire. One of the most exhaustively studied pyroCb events to date occurred during the Chisholm Fire, the same one American satellite data analysts initially suspected might be a nuclear bomb test. The plume it generated obscured an area of more than fifty thousand square miles, roughly the size of Greece. While they remain an atmospheric rarity, pyroCbs have become significantly more common over the past two decades, occurring around the world, in places they have never been observed before.
In addition to hail, pyroCbs can also generate their own lightning. “Pyrogenic lightning” has been described since ancient times, but almost exclusively in the context of large volcanic eruptions. While ember-generated fires are relatively easy to predict (they appear downwind, typically less than five miles from their source), fires caused by lightning can be ignited virtually anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of a pyroCb, where they are accompanied by all the hazards associated with electrical storms—tower strikes, power outages, and electrocution. By 4:00 p.m., as tens of thousands of citizens were making their slow escape, Fort McMurray was experiencing the same “darkness at noon” phenomenon associated with apocalyptic events recounted throughout the world’s histories and mythologies. With the forest already primed to burn, a pyroCb, combined with wind-driven embers and lightning, changed this fire from a localized conflagration into a perpetual motion machine of destruction operating on a regional scale. Given the long-term forecast, this fire could burn as long as the fuel held out, and, in these conditions, the boreal forest was nothing but fuel.
As residents fled, a skeleton crew of firefighters, first responders, and volunteers numbering in the very low hundreds was left behind to fight for the city’s life. Within the superheated miasma that had enveloped Highway 63, life-and-death dramas were unfolding. Jet Ranger helicopters were seen flying over downtown with buckets of water and retardant to target crucial infrastructure, including the hospital and city hall, where the morning press conference had wrapped up barely three hours earlier. Vince McDermott, a journalist for the local paper, Fort McMurray Today, tweeted what could have been a reporter’s line from Armageddon: “All I can hear right now in downtown are sirens and helicopters.” “Hear” was the operative sense, because, even in the heart of town, many blocks from the fire, it was now physically painful to have your eyes open, and the simple act of breathing was growing difficult. Along with the smoke came heat, and it pushed downtown temperatures into uncharted territory. Jill Edwards, the business manager at KAOS Radio, a local Christian station, was evacuating from downtown, when her car thermometer registered 109°F. Radiant heat from the fire had pushed the local temperature almost twenty degrees above the high, which—even without the fire—exceeded the forecast, topping out at 91°F, shattering the previous record for that date. As Arizona heat baked the city, the downtown on-ramps for Highway 63 seized in gridlock. Buffeting winds caused by the fire interacting with the region’s complex topography sent smoke and embers swirling in all directions. Upwind or downwind, nowhere was off-limits to ignition. In this way, the fire had created optimal conditions for its spread that bore an uncanny similarity to a successful virus, or a monopoly: once these entities reach a certain breadth and density of distribution, there are no longer any bad opportunities; every situation can be turned to advantage.
Out on the highway, drivers were making some more painful discoveries: an $80,000 truck equipped with a touchscreen, crew cab, four-wheel drive, and a 6.4-liter Hemi engine is only as good as the fuel in its tank. Most pickups can hold twenty-five gallons or so—more than half a barrel’s worth, and more than enough to get to Edmonton, five hours away. But many fuel tanks were running on empty that day. With each successive mile, a steadily growing number of vehicles were pulled off onto the shoulder and median. Surrounded by fire, with an infinite supply of bitumen just below them, those engines had nothing left to burn.
Because the scale of the event was poorly understood and in flux, many evacuees left town under the impression that they would be returning soon, while others feared that the entire city would be lost. Some who had friends in the fire department, or smartphone-linked alarm systems, discovered as they drove that their homes were on fire. An unintended consequence of the evacuation was the collapse of the 911 system. With virtually everyone evacuating, the city effectively lost its eyes and ears. It hardly mattered: the most likely reason for calling (“I’d like to report a fire”) was now moot, and those in a position to respond—roughly three hundred firefighters, police, assorted first responders, and volunteers—were already overwhelmed. Most of their partners and families were evacuating, and, if they were able to contact them at all, it was to speak for what more than a few believed might be the last time. This was true even in the relative safety of the REOC at Hall 5, which wouldn’t be safe for long. At lunchtime—both a moment and a lifetime ago—terminal good-byes had been the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Even at this late hour, there were residents of Fort McMurray who were unaware of the fire. Because it was a workday, many of them missed the press conference and the later updates. David Smith, an instructor in environmental studies at Keyano College’s downtown campus, was working in his basement office that afternoon. It was quiet as a cave down there, and while he was sequestered in the monk-like solitude of his windowless room, time and events had been accelerating in a way that they rarely do anywhere, and never do in the basement of Keyano College. Smith had no idea what awaited him outside until around three in the afternoon, when an evacuating colleague knocked on his door just to make sure no one was left behind. The surface world he emerged into was barely recognizable. Smith is a trained ecologist, well versed in the boreal fire cycle, but he had never imagined he would be part of it. His first thought was his dogs.
The abrupt end to business as usual was manifesting itself in prosaic ways that now felt almost poignant. Squeezed in between evacuation notices, the municipality’s Twitter feed posted this message: “Due to the forest fires, today’s Council Meeting and Sustainable Development Committee meeting have been cancelled.” There was nothing sustainable about any of this, and the idea of a meeting—of any kind—was suddenly inconceivable. The post came with a new hashtag: #ymmfire; only minutes old at the time of its posting, #ymmfire would remain active not for days, but for years.
Because of the massive smoke pall over the city, and the fact that the recently expanded Fort McMurray airport was in grave danger of being overrun by fire, there were no flights in or out. Instead, charter flights were running through the bitumen plants’ own airfields, some of which are capable of handling passenger jets. As fast as workers were flown out, evacuees from the city took their places. Meanwhile, six of the hottest, driest, windiest hours of the day were still to come. The relative humidity—second only to wind in terms of its importance to fire behavior—was still dropping. It would bottom out at 12 percent, a level of desiccation typically found in kiln-dried lumber.
On Sunday, May 1, when Fire 009 first posed a serious threat, Chief Darby Allen had made a call to Dale Bendfeld. Bendfeld, fifty-ish, lean, crisp, and calculating with short, sandy hair over a high forehead, was a former RCMP officer who also held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, where he served in Afghanistan, Europe, and the Middle East. In 1998, he helped lead the response to a devastating ice storm, the costliest disaster in Quebec’s history. In 2003, he led a military team responding to the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, then one of Canada’s most destructive modern fires, in which 240 buildings were lost in southern British Columbia. In 2010, he managed security strategy for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. In 2012, he was hired as Fort McMurray’s executive director of municipal law enforcement and protective services. It was an unusual title because Fort McMurray is an unusual place, a complex blend of foreign, federal, provincial, corporate, and municipal interests with assets as sensitive as a military installation. It was understood that the city and the bitumen industry were vulnerable to terrorists as well as natural disasters, and Bendfeld had expertise in both.
Each day, based on field reports, weather forecasts, and computer models, educated judgment calls had been made by Darby Allen, the wildfire manager Bernie Schmitte, and their deputies and advisers, including Bendfeld, Darryl Johnson from Forestry, Jody Butz from the fire department, and Chris Graham from Alberta Emergency Management, among others. The situation was dynamic in the extreme, and the interdepartmental politics and consultation were time-consuming; at times, hundreds of emails, phone calls, and texts were flowing through the REOC every minute. And yet, in the end, it was as if their accumulated discussions and decisions were in response to a different threat than the one actually confronting them.
Allen, Schmitte, Bendfeld, Butz—all of them took the threat of this fire seriously and were still blindsided by what it did. David Staples, a reporter with the Edmonton Journal, spoke to these men immediately afterward, and they confirmed what Jamie Coutts had observed in the REOC at lunchtime—leaders who seemed unable to meaningfully grasp the enormity of the danger facing them. “At times,” Staples wrote, “they headed to the REOC’s lookout tower to get their own view north, east and west. Only then did they have their own, ‘What the f*ck is going on!?’ moment. At one point, as they walked to the lookout, Bendfeld turned to Allen and said, ‘We are so fired.’ ”
“Mate,” Allen said, “we are so done.”
In spite of the REOC being equipped with state-of-the-art communications (and a clear view of the fire), and staffed with experienced members from every relevant agency, communications had broken down in fundamental ways. One of Allen’s lieutenants, Jody Butz, a youthful deputy chief you’d want on your rugby squad, described this moment to the CBC’s Laura Lynch: “We were starting to receive reports, not from Forestry,” he told her, “but from citizens on social media that they could see flame from the Shell station in Beacon Hill.”
A forensic analysis of the fire response prepared for Alberta Forestry in 2017 was blunt: “Rather than learning about the wildfire’s imminent incursion into Fort McMurray through the [Incident Command] structure, the RMWB Operations Chief [Darby Allen] discovered the wildfire was in the community through public reports over social media.”
The RCMP found out the same way.
This kind of failure, baffling as it may be, is not unique to the REOC in Fort McMurray; it is as old as human judgment. Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls it the “Lucretius Problem.” Named for Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman poet and philosopher, it refers to a bug in human perception observed by Lucretius in the first century BCE and described in Book VI of his epic poem, De Rarum Natura (On the Nature of Things):
Yes, and so any river is huge if it be the greatest man has seen
who has seen no greater before,…
and each imagines as huge all things of every kind
which are greatest of those he has seen…
Two thousand years later, in a companion to The Black Swan called Antifragile, Nassim Taleb paraphrased the Lucretius Problem this way: “The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest he has observed.” But “fool” seems awfully harsh for such a persistent human failing. The TV journalist Reid Fiest experienced it himself when he saw the fire enter Beacon Hill: “I didn’t quite believe it yet,” he said. “I had never been in a situation like that.” The firefighter Evan Crofford had the same reaction: “I thought, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ I never thought it would hit us like it did.”
In essence, the Lucretius Problem is rooted in the difficulty humans have imagining and assimilating things outside their own personal experience. Hundredth-percentile fire weather conditions during the hottest, driest May in recorded history, following a two-year drought in a sudden city filled with twenty-five thousand petroleum-infused boxes and surrounded by millions of desiccated trees, is something no Canadian firefighter or emergency manager had experienced. But this is the nature of twenty-first-century WUI fire, and not just in the boreal forest. Authorities in California, Australia, Greece, Spain, Russia, and elsewhere have found themselves in the same situation—basing their responses on outdated concepts, on what they’ve already seen, instead of what fire weather is capable of now. The data was there, but the interpretation wasn’t, and this—the Lucretius Problem—gave the Fort McMurray Fire an all but unassailable advantage over the people charged with fighting it.
The consequences would be severe. On May 1 and 2, the REOC’s primary objective was the same as Slave Lake’s in 2011: establish a perimeter around the fire and prevent it from entering the city. By 2:00 p.m. on May 3, it was simply to keep the death toll as low as possible.
A citywide evacuation had never been considered by the city’s emergency planners, but as the fire overran neighborhood after neighborhood, and the surging traffic slowed to a crawl, Highway 63’s limitations became obvious: there simply wasn’t enough road to accommodate all those cars, especially when that road was enveloped in smoke with fire burning right up to the breakdown lanes. Dale Bendfeld’s training had taught him to look at risk through a military lens: to prioritize threats, values, and objectives. Drawing on his experience managing logistics in crisis situations, Bendfeld did the math, and the numbers were daunting: five hundred vehicles from Beacon Hill would require at least two or three miles of lane space on their own; one thousand vehicles from Abasand would require twice that. The west side neighborhoods would need ten times more. Given the speed and mobility of the fire, there simply wasn’t enough pavement to move all these vehicles out of harm’s way—if they all went south. But if traffic was evacuated in both directions, it would double the available road space on 63, and they might have a chance. Where all these evacuees would go once they were safely out of town was unclear, but there was no time to worry about that now. “This gives the most people the best chance of surviving,” Darby Allen explained to Marion Warnica, a reporter with the CBC. “Because right now, I’m concerned we’ll have vehicles on the road on fire.”
Privately, leaders in the REOC wondered whether deaths would be counted in the dozens, or the hundreds, or worse.
There was no middle ground: anyone who didn’t evacuate north toward the man camps and Fort McKay headed south as far as the fuel held out, snaking through the eye-blink hamlets of Mariana Lake, Wandering River, and Grassland, wiping out gas supplies, ATMs, and convenience store shelves as they went. The original emergency shelter—the massive rec center on MacDonald Island, surrounded by water and connected to downtown by a narrow causeway—was far too small to accommodate so many evacuees. That afternoon, it was being used as a bus depot to evacuate those left behind. In the coming days, MacDonald Island would transform again—into a marshaling yard for emergency vehicles, and a kind of drop-in center for exhausted emergency personnel.
John Knox, the program director for Country 93.3, left the radio station shortly after 3:30, when a mandatory evacuation was ordered for downtown and the RCMP started banging on doors. By then, 63 South was in imminent danger of being overrun by fire. Despite this and the daunting traffic, Knox opted to go south; through the choking smoke, he saw firsthand how deeply the fire had penetrated his city. Less than a mile south of downtown, directly opposite Beacon Hill on the east side of the highway, was the riverside neighborhood of Waterways. There, clustered around the playing fields of J. Howard Pew Memorial Park, rows of newer trailer homes stood side by side with some of Fort McMurray’s oldest buildings. The Royal Canadian Legion was located there, and so was the Athabasca Tribal Council office. “I looked down at Waterways,” said Knox, “and I started to cry. It was gone.”
The way the traffic rolled so slowly past these simmering ruins, headlights glowing like lanterns in the smoke, Knox might as well have been in a funeral cortege. There was no way to know if everyone had escaped in time—from Waterways, or Beacon Hill, or Abasand, or Thickwood; there was no way to know if cars behind him were on fire, or if the road would be blocked ahead. Knox tried to take a picture as he passed, to somehow capture the scale of this calamity, but the destruction was too broad to frame on his iPad. It had all happened so fast; the fire seemed to be everywhere.
In the umber haze, suffused with a throbbing volcanic glow, hallucinatory inversions were taking place: down in Waterways, on Pelican Drive, the ambient heat had grown so intense that a full-sized metal streetlight folded over on itself like a wilted flower. In Beacon Hill, Plexiglas bus shelters melted like milk jugs. On every block, cars and trucks were burning to the chassis, deforming the way bottles do in campfires, while their wheel rims bled aluminum in many-fingered streams. Through the fire’s countless acts of transformative violation, the ordinary was made grotesque; neighborhoods once distinguished by tidy uniformity now looked like suburban Hells rendered by Salvador Dalí.
As it blackened and flattened block after block, the fire was imposing on this highly ordered, type A city a kind of nihilistic anarchy that flouted every value its citizens, companies, and churches held dear: Down with everything! Burn it all! Go back where you came from! Binge and purge! In the face of this surreal undoing, the efforts of its industrious and prosperous inhabitants now appeared futile. This was a city of doers, but now the only thing to do was run away with their children and whatever they could carry. It was frightening, and it was also humiliating. As they fled down the highway in the heart-pounding slow motion one encounters in nightmares, scenes of destruction and defeat confronted them on every hand. A mile down the highway from Waterways, past the smoking ruins of Centennial Park Campground, the exploded Flying J gas station, and the burned-out Super 8, was the recently evacuated neighborhood of Gregoire and, next to it, the Mackenzie Industrial Park. While fires burned in the surrounding trees, a lone ladder truck could be seen spraying down a warehouse with the kind of high-pressure monitor used to fight fires in apartment buildings. But long before reaching its target, that laser-like jet of water—powerful enough to blow through windows and knock down doors—was being swept northward into the heart of the inferno like so much mist in the fire’s terrific, all-consuming wind.
Downtown, the six-story medical center was being evacuated and helicopters were water bombing the solid-brick city hall. The streets were choked with cars and trucks; the last time traffic had been this bad was during the boom. By 7:00 p.m., the entire city was under a mandatory evacuation order, and all four lanes of Highway 63 were clogged with southbound traffic. In just a few hours, firefighters had been forced to give up a shocking amount of ground as the fire advanced, virtually uncontested, through the south and west sides of the city. Soon, even the REOC would be forced to evacuate Fire Hall 5.
That evening, before a dark gray cloud that could have been mistaken for an approaching storm, CBC TV’s Marion Warnica interviewed Chief Darby Allen. He seemed a changed man, unable to meet the camera’s gaze or even, it seemed, his interviewer’s. The volatile and rapidly changing scenario Allen had alluded to during the morning press conference had metastasized into something inconceivable a few hours earlier. When it comes to wildfire fighting, most seasoned incident commanders have a story or two about the one that “went over the hill”—that got away. There are consequences for this, but it’s usually tallied in acres burned, not in homes, or lives. The magnitude of the losses Bernie Schmitte and Darby Allen had to account for—and also to own—was on another scale altogether, almost beyond reckoning. It was a fire chief’s worst nightmare, and it took all of Allen’s strength to summon the words without breaking down. “I—I would say it’s been the—it’s been the worst day of my career,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. It was an unusual way for the director of emergency management to begin an update, but this was not scripted; this was a raw, unsanitized reaction to the worst day—not only of Allen’s career, but in the lives of tens of thousands of people whom he was charged with protecting. The chief kept his eyes averted as he wrangled the sobs in his throat into intelligible words. “And I am uh—you know, the whole uh—the people here are devastated. Everyone’s devastated. The community is gonna be devastated. This is going to go on; this is gonna take us a while to come back from, but we—we’ll come back.”
There was, at that early stage—with the fire raging unabated, the city completely obscured by smoke, and many believing, not unreasonably, that Fort McMurray was lost—no way to know who would come back, or when, or even if. But duty obliged the chief to say it, and the chief was a dutiful man. At this point, Allen got a grip on himself. Seeming to realize that he had gotten ahead of the story, and, remembering that he should provide details, beginning with what had actually happened, he started again: “We’ve had a devastatin’ day. Um—Fort McMurray has been overrun by wildfire.”