In a week where fires blazed out of control across Hawaii, killing dozens and forcing the evacuation of thousands, no book feels timelier than John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, a deeply reported narrative of one of Canada’s most destructive recent wildfires. It is also a strongly argued polemic on the culpability of the petrochemical industry in a hotter, increasingly flammable world.
In a cleverly constructed narrative that reads in parts like a Jane Harper thriller, we meet a cast of real-life characters chasing their fortunes in Fort McMurray, a modern boom town built to exploit Alberta’s vast reserves of tar sands. Their lives were upended, sometimes forever, when a wildfire known as MWF-009 ripped through the city streets, destroying more than 3,000 homes and buildings and forcing 90,000 residents to flee for their lives.
Fire in the boreal forest is natural and necessary, being relied upon by certain tree species for seed dispersal, but MWF-009 was an inferno of terrifying intensity and almost unprecedented destructive power. In an ultra-dry, unseasonably hot spring, what might have been a small, not particularly notable blaze took hold, rapidly outstripping human powers of containment and leaping the Athabasca river.
The book’s cast of characters includes the firemen Jamie and Ryan Coutts, the radio DJ Chris Vandenbreekel, the welder Wayne McGrath, the equipment salesman Paul Ayearst and the oil firm staffer Shandra Linder. They alternately battled with, reported on and sheltered from the raging flames in May 2016. All of them, firefighters included, found themselves in uncharted territory, and for a surprisingly long time even the city’s mayor and fire chief failed to grasp the urgency and severity of the crisis they were facing.
Even as the fire raced towards the city, barely hampered by pressure-hoses, water drops, retardants and firebreaks, residents were still being advised to “go to work … take the kids to school … [drive] the guys to the ballgame afterwards”. The worst-case scenario, Vaillant explains, “was left unsaid — not because it went without saying, but because it was unsayable”. Only hours later, even as the danger became undeniable and emergency workers were going door to door to flush out the final evacuees, residents prevaricated over which car to drive or rushed home to lock the doors of a house that would in short order be reduced to a pile of ash.
Fire in the boreal forest is natural and necessary, but MWF-009 was an inferno of terrifying intensity and almost unprecedented destructive power.
In one telling passage, a man working in a dry cleaners is described calling his wife at home to tell her to “get out, get out” even as, in the next breath, he accepts a new bag of clothing to be picked up in a few days’ time. Ayearst found himself calming his hysterical wife as they packed to leave. “The fire!” she screamed, as he urged her to focus on the task in hand. “No!” she continued, “You don’t understand. The fire’s on our street!”
Even as the fire raced towards the city, residents were still being advised to “go to work … take the kids to school … [drive] the guys to the ballgame afterwards.” The worst-case scenario “was left unsaid.”
One could — and Vaillant does — draw parallels with our collective response to the accelerating global climate crisis. Fort McMurray was built to serve not only the oil industry, but one of its most environmentally destructive and least efficient sectors (“It takes two tonnes of bituminous sand to make a single barrel of bitumen,” Vaillant notes, and even then you are only at the beginning of a highly technical and energy-intensive process to transform this viscous, foul-smelling tar into useable synthetic oil). That this city should fall victim to wildfire, one of the unpleasant by-products of a warming atmosphere, feels too apt an irony to pass over.
The Fort McMurray fire was a terrifying, once-in-a-lifetime experience and just one more data point in a worsening trend, a portent of things to come in a world where global temperatures are repeatedly breaking records, inextinguishable fires smolder through peat bogs and tundra, and the previously unknown phenomenon of “fire tornados” are documented on iPhone cameras.
Homes in Fort McMurray — the prices of which were hugely inflated thanks to the extravagant salaries in the city, where even an apprentice pipe fitter might rake in $150,000 a year — had not only been paid for with oil money, Vaillant writes, but constructed out of petrochemical products too. Like many contemporary homes, they were “shingled with tar, clad with vinyl siding, illuminated by vinyl windows, the wood impregnated with glues and resins, the floors covered in linoleum, polypropylene carpeting, or highly flammable laminates”.
Vaillant’s description of the fire rips along, an adrenaline-soaked nightmare that is impossible to put down. The fire took hold, then burned for days at unimaginable temperatures. Narratively speaking, it is difficult to maintain such a pitch of intensity over more than 350 pages, and he doesn’t try. Still, the gear-shifts can be shuddering. Every few pages we come screaming down an off-ramp and barrel right into a slow-moving meditation on, say, the history of extractive capitalism in Canada, or how the greenhouse effect was discovered. These passages, although well researched, feel incongruously ponderous in the shadow of our primary storyline.
The fire was a portent of things to come in a world where global temperatures are repeatedly breaking records and the previously unknown phenomenon of “fire tornados” are documented on iPhone cameras.
Vaillant is a skilled longform journalist, and one senses the shape of a leaner, more agile account of perhaps 30,000 words at the heart of this hefty tome. During the most self-indulgently intellectual sections (“Breathing,” he declares at one point, is “a biochemical analog to hope”) and some of the more meandering first-person accounts, I found myself yearning for the abridged version. But, overall, the drama of the unfolding action and the righteous anger of the polemic concealed within are engrossing.
For, of course, he is right. We, like the people of Fort McMurray, are sleepwalking into crisis, a worldwide firestorm. And there is nowhere to escape to. Just look at the headlines: Rhodes, Corfu, Sicily, Syria, Algeria, Tunisia, Portugal, Croatia, Lombardy, Turkey, Corsica — all in flames. Smoke from the latest Canadian wildfires is blowing in from across the Atlantic. Hundreds of firefighters battle the flames during a Californian fire season that is expanding to fill the entire year.
The oil industry must be stopped in its tracks, Vaillant argues, and the legal system might finally be preparing to call time. He wraps up his account with a summary of legal cases that have thrown obstacles in the path of further drilling and refining. Last year, a US judge invalidated 125,000 square miles of drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico; the year before, an Australian judge declared climate change “the greatest intergenerational injustice ever inflicted by one generation of humans upon the next”. The book ends with an encouraging list of large-scale national and corporate divestment from fossil fuel holdings.
But in the war against climate change, these remain small victories. “Every day,” Vaillant reminds us, “humans consume about 100m barrels of crude oil, while 40m more are in transport around the world.” We are a “global fire cult — the dutiful keepers of a trillion flames”. It’s time to blow them out, before they suffocate us all.
Cal Flyn is a Scottish author and journalist