‘Virtually Any City on Earth Can Burn Now’

In the superheated 21st century, the old rules for wildfires no longer apply. John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather,” explains.

KILEY BENSE: Can you talk about the connections between climate change and the fires in Los Angeles? What are the causes of these fires?

JOHN VAILLANT: We’ve seen a lot of local [blame]: It’s,“Well, the governor didn’t do this, and the mayor didn’t do that, and that reservoir wasn’t full.” None of that would have made a bit of difference. Whenever those 100-mile-an-hour winds are blowing, it just doesn’t matter who’s in charge. Who’s in charge is the wind; who’s in charge is the fire. And who made it worse is human beings by burning fossil fuels at an extraordinary rate for 200 years straight.

My tendency is to look at things more systemically, and what climate change does is it takes naturally occurring phenomena and makes them more intense and more erratic, and also creates conditions for them to occur in places they didn’t normally occur. We all know Southern California is flammable. It’s part of the rhythm of this landscape. But they hadn’t, historically, had to deal with fires of this intensity with this frequency. And so that’s the other thing: these events are going to happen more and more often.

California really is in a position to move the needle globally on climate change, because it’s the fifth biggest economy in the world. If California took a particular stance on petroleum, took a particular stance on building codes, took a particular stance on insurance coverage in dangerous environments, it could set the tune. This is an opportunity for Los Angeles to be a leader in building for the 21st century.

BENSE: Your book focuses on the fire that happened in Fort McMurray in 2016, another disaster in a landscape where fire is a natural part of the rhythms of the ecosystem. Do you see any other parallels between that fire and what’s happening in California right now?

VAILLANT: They had two years of drought followed by record-breaking heat. And so an ordinary fire in Alberta turned into the worst fire in Canadian history.

Here we had the hottest summer in Los Angeles history, followed by eight months of drought and, you could say, a freak wind event, but it’s historically possible. But again, the chances of such events occurring have been increased by climate change, by the heating and drying of the atmosphere. I see them as having almost identical causes: exceptional heat and drought took naturally occurring fires and made them catastrophic.

BENSE: Has anything in Fort McMurray changed since the fire? What has been the reaction long-term?

VAILLANT: It is really brutal. The utility of Fort McMurray as a lab for understanding a petroleum-powered civilization is that it’s a petroleum town, and the petroleum industry is at root, a fire industry. You cannot have a petroleum industry without burning stuff. And so they don’t want anything to change. They’ve actually increased production since the fire. They’ve rebuilt all those neighborhoods, and they’ve rebuilt the houses bigger, but otherwise basically the same way, so they have tar shingles and vinyl siding.

There’s a bigger fire break around the city, but fire breaks don’t stop embers. Embers can fly hundreds and hundreds of yards, if not miles, when the conditions are right. Fort McMurray could burn again.

Alberta is kind of the Texas of Canada. It is a very right-wing conservative state run by people who are beholden to and dependent on the petroleum industry and are studious deniers of climate change. It’s becoming more hellish and less habitable by the year. They have terrible droughts up there now. There’s crop failure and all kinds of water failure and rivers going dry. But they won’t discuss that. They won’t address that.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16012025/fire-weather-author-john-vaillant-parallels-fort-mcmurray-los-angeles/

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