‘Virtually Any City on Earth Can Burn Now’
The journalist John Vaillant’s book “Fire Weather” begins in the spring of 2016 in the boreal forests surrounding the remote Canadian city of Fort McMurray, where a fire is growing. Although wildfire is a regular part of life in northern Alberta, this fire was destined to be different. “A new kind of fire introduced itself to the world,” Vaillant writes.
Ushered in by soaring temperatures, drought and high winds, this wildfire obliterated thousands of buildings, forced 88,000 people to evacuate and turned downtown Fort McMurray into an apocalyptic hellscape. At the time, the Fort McMurray fire was unprecedented. But Vaillant saw it for what it really was: a harbinger of terrifying things to come.
Inside Climate News spoke with Vaillant about what we can learn from the fires currently burning in Los Angeles; the parallels between this disaster and what happened in Fort McMurray in 2016; and what we should expect from what he calls our “century of fire.”