By Sarah K. Simon
I love reading across genres, but thrillers are a favorite, especially the kind that keep me up too late racing to find out what happens next. I devour scary stories quickly, drawn to the adrenaline and suspense. But recently, I read a book that shook me to the core. It wasn’t just scary; it was true. Fire Weather forced me to slow down, to take it in small, uneasy bites. For once, I didn’t want to know what happened next. I wasn’t racing, I was bracing.
Though much of John Vaillant’s bestselling book Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World takes place in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the story hit close to home this year. With neighbors affected by the Brimson Complex fires, it was difficult to read about the 2016 wildfire that destroyed one of Canada’s petroleum hubs, deep in the boreal forest.
Learning how Fort McMurray grew into a big, isolated industrial city near the Athabasca oil sands was fascinating and a little suspenseful, knowing what was coming.
Vaillant provides a detailed history of the industry and the area, first home to the Cree and Dene peoples, who used natural bitumen deposits, a thick, sticky black substance, to waterproof their canoes. When Europeans arrived, they were focused on the fur trade, and by 1870 the Hudson’s Bay Company had established a trading post.
By the early 1900s, scientists and entrepreneurs began experimenting with oil sands extraction. Though difficult and inefficient, they recognized its potential. In the 1930s, Alberta and private companies invested in that potential, and by 1967 Great Canadian Oil Sands (now Suncor) launched the first commercial oil sands operation, which would eventually shape Fort McMurray into the boomtown it became.
One of the sharpest ironies Vaillant points out is that the same industry that built Fort McMurray also helped set it up for disaster. Built on bitumen and fueled by fossil wealth, the city became a symbol of industrial ambition, only to be nearly consumed by a wildfire intensified by the same climate forces that the industry helped accelerate.
The fire was likely human-caused, though no official determination was made, according to Vaillant. It was first detected by MWF 009 firefighters on May 1, 2016. Temperatures were 30 degrees above average for May, with strong winds, low humidity, and dry vegetation following multiple low snowfall winters, conditions that may sound familiar to anyone who experienced the Brimson Complex fires.
The surrounding boreal forest, which long ago had been managed by Indigenous people through controlled burns, hadn’t burned for decades. Once ignited, Vaillant described it going off like a “combustion engine.” Hungry for more fuel, the fire also consumed homes filled, ironically, with petroleum-based materials such as vinyl siding, synthetic furniture, and asphalt shingles. The “parched bombs of petrochemicals,” as Vaillant describes them, made the fire behave like an industrial explosion.
Firefighters nicknamed the fire “The Beast” because of its size, speed, and unpredictability. It was hotter than the surface of Venus, Vaillant writes, and overwhelmed crews with its ability to create its own weather, making aerial suppression nearly impossible.
With traditional tactics failing and entire homes being consumed in as quickly as three minutes during flashovers, one of the firefighting crews Vaillant follows found that the only way to stop the fire was to destroy homes ahead of it, removing fuel before it arrived. Visions of bulldozers flattening homes still filled with their owners’ lives and livelihoods are something that will haunt them forever.
It’s when Vaillant brings the story into those real moments of chaos and courage that the tales he recounts feel more like a blockbuster hit than a documentary. It’s a traumatic and intense read, with interviews from firefighters and survivors of a fire that evacuated 88,000 people and burned 1.46 million acres before it was through. A total of 3,244 structures were destroyed, 2,400 of them homes and businesses.
Temporary shutdowns caused losses of 1.2 million barrels per day, totaling over $7.6 billion. Incredibly, no lives were lost directly to the fire, but when livelihoods are affected and survivors try to overcome their trauma, mental and physical health can deteriorate. Vaillant captures this through the story of a Fort McMurray resident and the tragic events that followed the fire.
Fire Weather draws parallels to equally terrifying events around the globe, including California, Australia, and the Siberian and Arctic fires, among others. He uses these examples to show that we’ve entered a “new century of fire.”
This new era is compounded by what he calls a “new kind of storm”: fire tornadoes, or pyro tornadoes. (Add that to your list of nightmare fuel.) Firefighters who have witnessed them call them otherworldly and apocalyptic. Vaillant recounts one such event during the Carr Fire in California in 2018, when a fire generated a spinning column of flame and debris over 1,000 feet across.
Vaillant compares the fire’s flashover to an atomic bomb, with neighborhoods reduced to ash in seconds. These events are no longer rare anomalies. The term “pyro tornadogenesis,” a striking word for a game of hangman, did not exist before 2003, an indication of our changing world.
Fire Weather is an important read, even if you have to take it in small bites like I did. (Big thank you to the local library system for their renewal policy.) It’s a book that is carefully put together and digs into climate change and control, the psychology of disaster, the fragility of industrial systems, and the strange behavior of fire on the front lines.
