Fire Weather by John Vaillant

In my head, the soundtrack for this book is similar to the 2022 All Quiet On The Western Front--where every time something that is worse than the terrible situation that defines WWI happens, a sousaphone gives the viewer a heads up with soul trembling sound. The author starts off with the harrowing account of the 2016 inferno that engulfed the Canadian oil town of Fort McMurray, and the lives of the people who confronted it and then uses that example as an urgent warning about what the future holds. Fire number nine, which began in those same boreal forests, was among other things an awesome demonstration of the power of all that fire can be. A day after the blaze was first identified, it had increased in size 500-fold. Despite the efforts of firefighters, armed with bulldozers and aerial water bombers, it doubled in the next few hours and then it doubled again. On 2 May the fire did the unthinkable and crossed the Athabasca River, a third of a mile wide, which divides the southern part of Fort McMurray from the tree line. By 3 May, 88,000 people had been evacuated from its path; by the end of the following day, about 2,000 of the city’s buildings had been destroyed. By then the fire had become a firestorm – creating its own weather in the form of gale force winds and lightning, which seeded more fires as it spread. The author then goes on to describe why given everything, this is likely to not be the exception but rather the norm--and the Canadian fires of last summer show that to be true.