The Canadian city of Fort McMurray, 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle, 600 miles north of the US border, is, John Vaillant writes, “an island of industry in an ocean of trees”. This all-consuming book is about the connection between those trees and that industry; an increasingly deadly symbiosis.
Fort McMurray is an oil town. It was built to service the tar sands of Alberta, a state that produces about 40% of all American oil imports. At times, when the price of crude has been high, the city has been known as Fort McMoney.
That money, however, is revenue from the trade that has an ever-more significant byproduct: the incremental warming of the planet. One result of that warming has been that the vast ocean of trees in which Fort McMoney sits has become, in recent years, increasingly likely to burn. The 100,000 permanent and temporary citizens of the city are both frontline creators and potential victims of global warming.
In 2016, Vaillant argues, those two realities – fossil fuels and forest – came together in a local apocalypse. After a record-breaking dry and warm winter in Alberta that year – parts of the state had very little snow – the unending boreal forests around Fort McMurray had, by spring, already experienced eight large-scale fires.
Fire number nine, however, which was identified on the last day of April, was different. That fire is the subject of Vaillant’s urgent disaster story, meticulous in its detail, both human and geological in its scale, and often shocking in its conclusions.
To begin with, Vaillant describes the sheer voraciousness of the industry on which Fort McMurray is built. The bitumen embedded in the upper layers of the local earth is notoriously difficult to extract. It requires hundred-tonne bulldozers to clear forests (the trees are known as “overburden” in industry euphemism), vast drills and “three-storey” trucks, which feed bitumen rock into underground crushers “that can consume a city bus in three seconds”. In order to make the bitumen flow, it must first be melted out of sand and clay. That heating process uses about 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas daily, about a third of Canada’s entire consumption, and creates toxic ponds containing more than a trillion litres of contaminated water. Even those who make their fortunes on the tar sands describe the landscape as Mordor.
Fire number nine, which began in those same boreal forests, was among other things an awesome demonstration of the power of all that “fire in waiting”. A day after the blaze was first identified, it had increased in size 500-fold. Despite the efforts of the state’s 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 treeline. 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.
Vaillant’s oxygen-less prose puts you in the path of that conflagration, and into the lives of the people who confronted it. In the community of Slave Lake, near the city, the fire chief, Jamie Coutts, recalled the scene: “Metal melted, concrete spalled, a granite statue was reduced to pebbles – basically all moisture was released from everything. I kept hearing 1600 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees C). Too hot – that’s all I remember.” (As Vaillant points out, “spalling” is not a verb you hear “much below 500 degrees”. It’s when concrete returns to its constituent elements.)
There was a profound disparity between the ferocity of the event and the inadequacy of the response to it. “We had a plan,” Coutts recalled, “that was good for 45 years. And then the first time we had to literally do our plan it all fell to shit.” Part of the plan was Slave Lake’s “sprinkler rig”, which involved 120 garden sprinklers, four gas pumps and hoses in various lengths and diameters.
There had been legendary fires in these forests before – in living memory, in 1950 and 2001 – but Vaillant makes a persuasive case that this one marked a new reality. He demonstrates how the historic highs and lows of that year’s weather – part of an insistent pattern – had become the wildfire’s greatest ally: high temperatures, low humidity, dry fuel and strong winds all created fire of unusual intensity. That intensity could be measured in real time: the event that seasoned firefighters knew as “crossover” occurred at unprecedented speed. Crossover, you learn, happens when the fire leaps from the forest floor to the tree canopy, causing trees at its front edge not to ignite but to instantly explode because of radiant heat, casting embers huge distances.
Once the fire crossed the river and reached the city, the houses in its path behaved similarly. They didn’t burn, they essentially vaporised – not least because most were constructed from petroleum-based products: shingled with tar and clad with vinyl and furnished with plastics and laminates. Those who were nearest to the front edge of the fire tornado remarked on the constant barrage of bomb-like explosions, which was the sound of propane tanks and fuel in vehicles making shrapnel of thousands of barbecues and cars. “Millions of dollars of real estate were converting to combustive gases every minute,” Vaillant writes.
By the end of that week the fire had burned half a million acres. It was still burning 15 months later, having consumed about 2,500 square miles of forest, an area roughly the size of Devon. Its ferocity, Vaillant suggests, has since been echoed in fire events in Australia, California and elsewhere, all of which have “different internal conditions” to what has been seen previously, conditions created by “an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past 3 million years”.
Those ideal conditions, Vaillant argues, are not confined to the natural world. Since 2016, banks have loaned “$3.8trn to the oil and gas industry” for future projects. Meanwhile, governments continue to behave like the council leaders of Fort McMurray on 1 May 2016, who, “while acknowledging openly that the fire was huge, out of control and heading toward town in historic fire weather conditions”, for two days advised citizens to go about their business as usual.
• Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
