In 40 years of wildland firefighting, Mike Morrow had seen pretty much everything including – if rarely – fires like the monster below him. Watching out the open door of a helicopter, he stared down as it ate up kilometer after kilometer of boreal forest.
The Donnie Creek wildfire is the largest in British Columbia history. At more than 583,000 hectares (1.4m acres), it is larger than the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. It could swallow nine areas the size of New York City without blinking, but it wasn’t the fire’s size that worried Morrow – it was its behaviour.
