The Massive Wildfire Burning in Alberta | Hacker News Reader

The Massive Wildfire Burning in Alberta

theatlantic.com

165 pointscurtis74 comments

Those photos are nothing compared to some of the firsthand videos:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fort+mcmurray++...

It's honestly like something straight out of an apocalypse movie. Horrifying.

I live in Alberta (Calgary) so have obviously been following this closely. Two things stand out in the videos.

1. People are still very courteous while evacuating. I imagined it would be people driving across lawns and through parks. Instead most people are driving on the proper side of the street and letting others in.

2. We shouldn't take forest fires for granted and we should evacuate earlier. Tuesday morning this fire was a non story, then without warning people are driving down their street with 60m flames on the sidewalk. And not just a few hold outs, majority of the population came very close to injury or death. Fort McMurray has basically one way in and out (Hwy 63). If it had been blocked in both directors, this would be a much different story.

In regard to point 1, I think people were TOO courteous. Seriously, everyone is evacuating and heading in the same direction, so drive on BOTH sides of the road. In some of the videos I've seen, I'm really surprised that people didn't get trapped and die because the orderly evacuation that only uses half the possible road bandwidth.

As there were only two fatalities in the entire evacuation of nearly 80,000 people I think your assertion that people were "TOO courteous" is incorrect.

They were as curteous as needed to ensure a timely evacuation with a minimum of loss of life.

If someone had started being 'less courteous' chaos would have broken out and many more would have died.

As much as I hate the cliched phrase it would appear that 'keep calm and carry on' was the prudent thing to do in this situation.

You're probably right. I'm guessing my fear at being confronted by that situation would have led me to behave inappropriately. It's like being stuck in the slow lane, but the consequences aren't being late to work, they consequences are your entire family dying in the car beside you. I can't imagine how horrible that must have been for everyone involved.

Fort McMurray evacuee here.

I was in the Thickwood neighbourhood, and we were in complete gridlock. This only changed once the RCMP did exactly what you suggest -- they used both sides of the highway.

Both sides on the north side of the city were used for traffic heading north. Same on the south side.

Once they did that, traffic started moving again.

Glad you got out .. those videos were truly terrifying.

Emergency vehicles need to go the other way.

And people driving to pick up e.g. grandma, who can't drive, at her house.

Fair point.

Emergency vehicles often need the other lane to go either direction. Maximizing capacity is a more nuanced thing than one use/direction.

Fort McMurray evacuee here. One of those Youtube videos is from me. It was indeed apocalyptic to drive through the fire. Watching buildings burning as a fire raged on both sides of the car. Trying to reassure my kids that everything was going to be fine.

We're at a camp in Wandering River now, but unsure of the future.

This is a video of the fire actually overtaking the inside of a fleeing resident's house. It was caught on his home security camera.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-man-wat...

It's what it's like when forest fires engulf a community. Here's a couple others:

- http://s1.webmshare.com/m7gd8.webm Russia 2015(?)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPpOXH0ADSg Australia 2003

Wow...horrifying indeed :( For some reason, I found these front-yard bushes casually on fire some of the most dramatic images: https://youtu.be/PCc1FvZ3g0Q?t=134

Probably because that side of the street looks relatively normal except for, you know, that well groomed plant is on fire.

Yes, it's also what stuck out to me. As he drives away, you can see the fire consume the entire bush (looked like a fallen down tree to me?) and develop into a five-meter long torch.

Some of the fires in those videos have a strange purplish or blue glow at their edges. Is that flame burning outside the visible spectrum and can it be seen with the naked eye? Example: https://youtu.be/Fym6X-JvEOs?t=1m8s Or just an artifact of the recording technology?

If it's burning outside the visible spectrum, and the same part isn't also emitting visible light too, then that's really scary - it would mean that every time you see a fire like that, it's actually considerably larger than it seems.

I am curious whether you could see hydrogen burning on a camera like these dashcams.

Edit: This is absolutely crazy. What is going on in this video? https://youtu.be/Fym6X-JvEOs?t=1m59s

I would say it's just the auto white balance on the camera trying to deal with an unnaturally warm (color temp) scene by adding blue. Not sure what kind of street lights they have there, but they are also bluish which would imply the WB is significantly off

80 000 people being evacuated. Amazingly there has only been a single person killed to date as far as I'm aware of.

The Canadian government is matching Red Cross donations FWIW [1]

[1] https://donate.redcross.ca/ea-action/action?gclid=CjwKEAjwgb...

Two people died in the car accident on Hwy 63. For some reason they heavily reported just the single girl (she was a triplet).

Hadn't seen that covered. Thanks for the correction.

I did not realize the scope of this fire. The official Canadian disaster database lists the Great Ice Storm of 1998 as the costliest disaster in the nation's history. Adjusted for inflation, that storm caused 4.6 billion in damages. If the estimate in this article is accurate, this fire will be the most expensive natural disaster in Canada's history by a factor of two. It will beat out the combined cost of the top 5 disasters on the list.

http://cdd.publicsafety.gc.ca/rslts-eng.aspx?cultureCode=en-...

> I did not realize the scope of this fire.

And it's still expected to double in size, again, overnight tonight.

It is, thankfully, being blown away from populated areas at this point in time.

I always like NASA's earth observatories satellite images and analysis

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87985

apparently a really hot spring http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=87992

> As of May 4, the fire had burned almost 77 square kilometers (7,700 hectares), and its cause was still under investigation. Fire restrictions were in place for most of the province due to hot, dry conditions.

While the cause of this particular fire is still unknown, and there's a whole debate to be had on forest management, the Smokey the Bear PSA is still worthwhile: don't start fires you ain't supposed to. Every year or two in my part of the world there's a decent sized forest fire started by some idiot who couldn't wait for the wet season to burn off his brush.

From what I can tell from that first NASA image, the fire jumped across a >20m wide river (not sure of the scale)? Is that common?

Absolutely. It depends on the topography and fuel loads, but all it takes is for the wind to carry a burning ember (which are generated in _huge_ quantities in such a fire).

It would be the reason oil prices have gone up as it has spread to the oil-sands http://www.wsj.com/articles/alberta-evacuations-expanded-as-...

Fort Mac is really a boom town and it's my understanding that most of the residents of Fort Mac are employed directly or indirectly by oil & gas. Production will certainly be hurting in that area for a while to come.

Everyone seems to be either not considering or unaware of the tar sands relationship with the fire - surely ripping up millions of hectares of vegetation, which helps drive rainfall, has had some impact towards the severity of the fire.

Yup. Canadian dollar is being hurt by this too

A reminder that the best way to have large forest fires is to constantly prevent small forest fires.

I think you have that backwards. The way to prevent large forest fires is to regularly have small (preferably controlled) forest fires. Otherwise, forests accumulate undergrowth which makes the inevitable fire even bigger.

That's what powers said…

That's what I was thinking in seeing all of these photos/videos. What kind of controlled burn strategies does Alberta province have in place? I know that before these kind of policies were implemented in the Pacific northwest of the United States you would semi-periodically have disastrous wildfires, which are now largely mitigated by way of controlled burns to limit the extent and intensity of fires. I would like to think that similar strategies have been implemented in Alberta/BC but don't actually know the facts. Anyone want to chime in?

There is definitely a controlled burn programme. http://www.wildfire.alberta.ca/prescribed-fires/default.aspx

I heard this place gets fires pretty often but nothing to this extent yet. Glad they're getting lifted to Edmonton as soon as possible. This reminds me of the Australian wildfire seasons too and how those seem to get out of hand and and go on on for weeks

Reminds me of travelling near a large forest fire in Australia. The sky was covered with smoke such that the middle of the day was almost dark as night. Ash fell from the sky. Pretty scary. Took hours of driving to get away from that.

We were driving east out of Montana when there were bad fires a number of years ago. The sky was lit up but looked black, and we were driving parallel to the mountain range. As the sun set behind the mountains, through the smoke the sun appeared blood red. And after it set behind the peaks, it got really dark.

Brace yourselves, folks. This is the new normal.

Absolutely. There's a great deal of evidence that the frequency of severe forest fires is increasing and this is a significant problem.

Now is a good time to discuss this.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/fort-mcmurray-an...

It seems unlikely that much of this is actually due to climate change, but rather due to the way forests are managed (although this may be different in Canada where the forest area to people ratio is much higher). I don't have a good link handy but much has been written on this topic. In short, in the US at least there has been an attempt to avoid all forest fires, which leads to fewer fires that are more severe when they do happen. I don't remember the details and can't find the article, but it was mentioned that one area of the forest near last year's Oregon fire was under different management techniques and fared relatively well.

You can, of course, never know whether any particular fire is due to climate change or not. But there is no question that climate change is dramatically increasing the number and intensity of wildfires in western North America because of decreased precipitation. That, combined with increased human settlement in what were once wilderness areas, virtually guarantees that this sort of thing is going to happen more and more often, hence "the new normal."

http://www.adn.com/article/20150810/2015-alaska-wildfire-sea...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

I don't want photos. I want an article. Tell me why this fire is happening.

Pine beetles? Yes, well so much for investigative reporting, but if you just search for "pine beetles alberta" you will see photos that show the area that is burning was attacked about 10 years ago by pine beetle.

welcome to global warming.

wait a sec... Alberta? Fort McMurray!? I don't believe in karma, but I could change my mind. After all, the alberta tar sands project -- one of the most ecologically destructive projects on the planet is right there in Fort MucMurray.

Amazing

In 1971, more than half of Alberta’s boreal forest by area was classified as regenerating or young, and a third was “immature.” By 2011 more than 40 per cent had become “mature” and more than 20 per cent “overmature,” a category all but absent earlier.

This change is because of aggressive fire suppression. Before these major wildfire suppression efforts, boreal forests historically burned on an average cycle ranging from 50 to 200 years as a result of lightning and human-caused wildfires.

In 2011, an out of control wild fire burned the town of Slave Lake and four nearby communities. A prescient 2012 Alberta report on that disaster blamed rigorous wildfire suppression, stating:

" due to reduced wildfire activity, forests of Alberta are aging, which ultimately changes ecosystems and is beginning to increase the risk of large and potentially costly catastrophic wildfires. "

http://wildfire.alberta.ca/wildfire-prevention-enforcement/w...

The report, while 95 pages, makes for compelling and moving reading, even without the context of the ongoing disaster near Fort McMurray.

Or, one could argue it is the largest cleanup operation on the planet. It would also be correct to state that the greatest lifesaver in Fort Mac is... oil. Cars, trucks, planes, helicopters all being powered by oil to save lives.

I for one am happy we are moving to electric vehicles, but we will face another set of problems dealing with lithium. We also would not be having this conversation if it were not the petrolium industry.

My point is this is a human event, with real lives at stake (my brother being one of them, who managed to escape to Edmonton). Let's leave 'karma' out of this, and move forward to make our world better.

Do you drive, use electricity, refrigeration, or eat meat? Then climate change us just as much your responsibility as a polluter. The oil sands provide the energy you consume and is one of the most environmentally regulated sources of oil in the world. Alberta oil sands also includes incredibly strict employee safety standards regulations and is one of the few major sources of oil not supporting a despotic government.

It's one thing to want to avoid climate change, but be honest in recognizing your complicity in the problem.

>welcome to global warming.

Maybe people wouldn't doubt climate change if every single negative thing that happens in nature wasn't attributed to it. Massive burns aren't exactly a new phenomenon.

>wait a sec... Alberta? Fort McMurray!? I don't believe in karma, but I could change my mind.

Karma will get you too. Maybe post here when it does so we can say you deserved it.

It's the overall aggregate trend that's concerning and in line with climatic models from 80s. We are seeing temperatures spike year over year, droughts intensify, floods worsen, storms strengthening, sea levels rising, and species extinction levels increasing.

It's incredibly smoky here in Minneapolis I can only imagine what it's like in Alberta.

Seems not too bad in St Paul, though to the west looks not great.

https://weather.com/safety/wildfires/news/fort-mcmurray-wild...

The speed that the fire spread is incredible. It seemed just like another forest fire that is near a community we get up in Alberta and British Columbia. The coverage by the National Post shows the fire just creeping around Ft. McMurray on May 2 and 3 and by May 4 a large portion of the town was engulfed. [1] Before and after photos show the burnt homes and buildings like schools. [2]

I live in Edmonton (4.5 hours south of Ft. McMurray) which is taking in a lot of evacuees. It's so heart warming to see so many people rise up and try to help everyone by donating places to sleep, someone put up a website to help facilitate http://www.ymmfire.ca. 2 blocks from my home is a drop off for supplies and all you hear is car horns of support and people waiting to drop off supplies. People drove up the previous days with pickup trucks to bring gasoline and supplies to motorist stranded on the highway. [3]

The most heartwarming of the stories to me is hearing of recent refugees helping out. [4]

“We understand what they’re feeling. When you lose everything, you have to start from zero. You lose your memories, your items. It’s not easy. It’s something very sad. We can totally understand their feeling. We are very thankful to the Canadian people and we want to be a part of this society. We will do our best to be a good part of this society. By doing that, maybe we can return a little bit of the great job that Canadian people did for us”

It feels good to see the support from the newcomers, people in the province and seeing our provincial and federal governments step in with resources and funding to fight the fire and help people.

1. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/tracking-the-fort-m...

2. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/see-stunning-before...

3. http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/national/inside+fort+mcm...

4. http://www.edmontonjournal.com/understand+what+they+feeling+...

Edits to links.

I built and posted the ymmfire.ca site on Tuesday evening to help the first wave of evacuees driving down. The response of people opening their homes, recreational properties, and spaces has been incredibly overwhelming. We're still helping match people but I've changed things up so I'm not the bottle neck now.

We're expecting (and hoping) that the highway will stay clear enough for more convoys over the next few days. Please donate to the Red Cross to help the over 80,000 displaced: https://donate.redcross.ca/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=195...

And if you have a site, maybe consider adding a link to donate. I built some low tech copy and paste banners that you can find here: http://ymmfire.ca/redcross

That is a great description. This fire had been raging South of town for a few days. Some southern neighbourhoods were evacuated temporarily.

We woke up on Tuesday and the sky was blue, and the fire was largely contained.

Then it jumped the Athabasca River (which is a kilometre wide). That's when panic set it.

I live in the Thickwood neighbourhood. We went from "hey, better get organized in case we need to evacuate" to "get the hell out now!" in about 20 minutes.

We got hit with the smoke today here in Montana.

Growing up in Montana not far from US2 we would quite often get the smoke from the forest fires straight west from us.

Getting the Alberta smoke from around Yellowstone is quite impressive and frightening.

I doubt the smoke you're seeing is from Fort McMurray. I live in Edmonton and we have beautiful clear skies- no smoke to be seen.

It's quite a plume. The synthetic image on the top left is showing where the smoke is affecting air quality:

http://alg.umbc.edu/usaq/

It's interesting to compare with the earlier reports. It was barely visible 5 days ago.

(at the time of the above post, the May 5 entry was at the top of the page)

We've had haze in Saskatoon for the last day or so. Might just be the way the winds are blowing? Or maybe there are other fires on the go.

I think you're right. But if you draw a straight line from Fort McMurray to Montana, it passes very close to Edmonton, so I doubt they'd see smoke in Montana from Fort McMurray while Edmonton has no smoke.

Just to add as a Lethbridge (about 100 km north of Montana) resident, on Fri we had scattered clouds. No smoke/smell that I've noticed.

Seeing these photos, watching the videos, you really start to understand how terrible climate change has become and still how much worse it will get if we don't transition faster.

All these natural disasters are really starting to effect us all. We need to act swiftly. Carbon energy must end.

Why do you think this particular wildfire is due to climate change?

    The ground is warmer (and therefore drier) now in
    May, and this is especially so in the Boreal Forest
    of Canada where temps. have been rising much faster
    than they have in the mid latitudes.

    This year the fire season started very early, and
    temperatures in the region have been at record levels
    for days, with some areas reaching above 30 C.

From http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2016/05/05/roaring-infe...

I think this has a lot to do with climate change. If the average temperatures are warmer and the air/ground is drier, it can increase the likelihood, frequency, and severity of wildfires. Colorado and California have been/will be going through the same thing.

Sometime back I intended to go for http://www.canadavisa.com/alberta-provincial-nominee-program...

That's a hell of a series of images... really drives home the insane amount of power in such a large fire.

suddenly the preppers dont seem so crazy afterall .

I'm sure their truckloads of ammunition turned out to be quite helpful through this ordeal.

not the ammunition. The bug out bags, food and water, bed rolls, escape strategies, family emergency plans. Those kinds of things.

Yeah ammo and guns is just scary.

That's bog standard disaster planning these days, being prepared in case it is necessary to evacuate your residence. In the US it's recommended by various agencies.

Prepping can probably be reserved for people getting ready for the end of civilized society.

> Yeah ammo and guns is just scary.

Until you realize that one deer can help feed your whole family.

yeah as a tool useful. Many prepper groups suggest stockpiling for a coming war and also because ammo will be a good currency.

I wouldn't disagree with them about it being a useful barter item. Never know when that crate of .45-70 Government will come in handy. ;-)

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