FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

News

Wildfires are raging across western North America and climate change is contributing

8.1 million acres of forest has burned throughout the United States, as volatile weather makes the west increasingly ripe for wildfires. The fires nearly reached the Burning Man festival.

As Florida and Texas work to clean up the devastation left behind by two massive hurricanes, there’s another natural disaster affecting the other end of the continent.

Wildfires are raging across much of western North America, from southern California to Canada’s north, following record-setting temperatures and drought conditions that laid the foundation for an extreme fire season.

According to the National Interagency Fire Centre, there are currently 62 large active fires burning more than 1.6 million acres down the western half of Canada and the United States, with Montana and Oregon reporting the highest number of large active fires.

Advertisement

The fires are affecting seven other states — California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming — and, north of the border, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario.

The Nevada fires even came within 16 miles of the Burning Man festival.

Smoke is hovering over much of the West, even in areas that aren’t experiencing fires.

Montana, in the midst of its hottest summer on record, is facing 20 large active fires across the state. The situation pushed Governor Steve Bullock to declare a state of emergency back in July. Since then, thousands of people have been evacuated, as both firefighters and the national guard have responded. People have lost their homes and livestock, and two firefighters have died battling the flames.

Thanks to the unusually high temperatures, 2017 is on track to be one of the worst forest fire years of the last decade. Thus far, 8.1 million acres of forest have been burned in the U.S. alone — behind the 8.6 million acres and 8.3 million acres in 2015 and 2012, respectively.

Experts say hotter temperatures have spurred on the fires, and climate change is a factor.

Some of these areas are already fire prone, so it’s harder to blame those fires entirely on climate change, explains Max Moritz, a statewide wildfire specialist at the University of California Cooperative Extension. But some fires have also struck areas that are normally wet with lots of precipitation, but this year have had unusually hot, dry conditions. That’s where climate change plays a role, he explains.

Advertisement

“Sometimes if a place is normally wet and has plenty of fuel [grass and trees, for example], what can prime the system for a big fire season is unusually warm conditions,” Moritz tells VICE News.

In some of these places, you could have a very short-term drought, even a dry month or two in a place that normally has precipitation in the summer, “and that place can all of a sudden become very fire-prone.

“There’s a lot of indications that climate change is playing a role,” Moritz says. He says the extent of the fires this season “line up with what a lot of our models are predicting for climate change and fire.”

David Phillips, senior climatologist for Environment and Climate Change Canada, says that when he crunched the numbers on the amount of smoke plaguing Calgary, Canada’s fourth-largest city, it “even blew me out of the water.”

Calgary, which usually has pristine air (“‘You can see forever,’ is often what Calgary brags about,” he says) has been choked with smoke from wildfires throughout the West this summer. Phillips says they’ve seen 325 hours of smoke from wildfires this year.

“That is 10 times the number of hours of smoke that they would normally get, say in the last 10 years,” he says.

“They’re tasting it, they’ve been feeling it, they’ve been seeing it and smelling it. It’s really been a big health issue for them.”

And in B.C., fires normally start in August, but they started in early July.

Advertisement

There are a number of factors contributing to the scale and intensity of the fires, he said.

In the B.C. interior, it was a wet winter and spring, which allowed grass to grow much faster and spring up in a desert environment. Then, all of a sudden, the wet weather stopped.

“It was almost like a weather-free zone, from when you look at the numbers certainly from June, July, and August — all kinds of records set in places like Kelowna, Kamloops, as the warmest summer on record, and also the driest. So in fact that is a recipe for disaster when it comes to wildfires,” Phillips says.

Climate change is contributing by leading to warmer temperatures and not enough precipitation, which create the drought conditions ideal for a fire, Phillips explained. Warmer temperatures also increase the number of lightning strikes, increasing the chances of a fire igniting in those dry conditions.

On the climate adaptation side, both experts pointed out that more people are building homes in the wilderness, and that is also contributing to the losses we’re hearing about due to wildfires.

One community, in northern Manitoba, was forced to evacuate because of the fires.

In late August, two wildfires closed in on either side of Chief Alex McDougall’s community of Wasagamack, an Indigenous community of 1,400 people. As they prepared evacuation plans, the power went out — that’s when they realized the flames had hopped across a river and were racing toward their homes. As night fell, they went house to house to spread the evacuation news by word of mouth.

Advertisement

“It was surreal; I couldn’t believe it,” McDougall told VICE News over the phone. “Everybody picked up what they could, their babies under their arms, and went with the clothes on their back, with the fire behind them, running toward the nursing station, which was our departure point.”

From the nursing station on the lakeshore, families began evacuating in tiny 16-foot aluminum boats — some of them without the necessary safety equipment or navigation lights — over the lake to reach an airport across the water. As they made the voyage in the dark, they could see flames lighting up the trees across the water.

The situation was so stressful that when they reached the other side, a young woman miscarried. And two people had to be hospitalized for pneumonia linked to smoke inhalation.

“We did manage to get everyone out that evening,” McDougall said. “I am very proud of my people, the way they came together and managed to support each other.”