'Most homes' in Lytton destroyed by catastrophic fire, B.C. minister says

People have very short memories - the wild swings are in full effect. Four years ago almost to the day dozens of wildfires started all over BC thanks to a series of heat waves, forcing a record 65,000 people to evacuate and burning over 1% of the entire province.

I moved to Seattle in August of that year and it wasn't until September that all the smoke cleared up. Literally moved a thousand miles north of California fire country and stepped into.... Pacific Northwest fire country.

What year was that 100 degree day in January?

Yeah, that's a great example. You can see some spot fires starting in a few places in the video along the side of the road.

If you know what you're doing, have backup power, and some water storage, someone staying behind to deal with the spot fires before they grow can have a large impact on the survivability of a house or neighborhood. If you're somewhere prone to wildfires and you have a pool (and are the sort to stay behind...), a good propane powered pump and enough hose to run good lines around the house will have a huge impact - and even if you don't have that, a few thousand gallons of water storage isn't that expensive (compared to a house). If you've got a properly set up wildfire rated house without much debris around it, a good Class A rated roof, and some water, you can do a lot.

Of course, you can always roll a 1, and certain houses (shake roof) will simply go up like a candle in an ember storm like this, but in that situation, I'm not sure a car stuck in traffic is the better option.

Houses can handle an awful lot of radiant heat, and they'll survive perfectly fine a radiant heat flux far beyond what a human can tolerate. You just can't let direct flame impinge on them for very long before it spreads.

You don't actually need non-flammable roofing - just a roof rated for the fire type.

Check Class A roof tests. A lot of asphalt shingles, properly installed, actually are Class A fire rated - which is a 12x12 2kg grid.

https://www.builddirect.com/learning-center/building-materia...

Interior corners on the roof or house tend to cause problems, though. Debris builds up and ignites, and just impinges on the siding until you light something behind it.

You can also have firebrands entering through attic vents and bypassing the roof - there are vent types that are resistant to this, but tend to cost a good bit more.

Why we don't do this in urban wildland interfaces... no idea.

Or keep the roof wet. As long as your water supply exists, roof sprinklers work. They're popular in Australia with people living in bushfire prone areas. https://build.com.au/roof-sprinklers

(It also helps that bush properties have large water tanks attached to them)

Parts of the province were down to 11% humidity. Lytton is renown for being extremely dry.

We need to just catch up and actually fund these controlled burns. It doesn't help that lands might be managed by different forms of government depending on where it is, and they all have different policies and funding levels to this sort of thing. When you look at Mexico its an entirely different story than even nearby southern california. Fires in Mexico in wildlands have historically not been fought, so there is much less fuel, and they don't get so unnaturally large and catastrophic like they do in the US and Canada.

The underlying problem is building permanent housing in areas that historically burn perennially. Outside of that, it's management that is needed to ensure fires are manageable enough where property can be protected. A grass and weed fire burns out much faster and is much less intense than one where there are dead trees and logs and a significant amount of larger dead accumulated brush that need much more time to burn to ash, and produce a lot more heat. The grass and native chapparel fires hardly seem to last a few days when they happen in southern california in areas that have recently burned. Whenever you see a long winded fire roasting away, like the one that threatened Mt. Wilson Observatory last year, you will inevitably also read something like "The last time this forest burned was in a fire that was fought 60 years ago."

Sure, you can have grasses build up, but a couple years of grass growth isn't going to lead to crown fires destroying the entire forest. It'll rip along the ground, kill the weak trees, clear the ground, etc.

Grass fires also don't tend to toss much in the way of firebrands - it's direct flame spread along the ground, and that's a lot easier to block/protect a property from than the flying ember variety of ignition sources. I keep a 15-20' bare dirt firebreak around our property because the hill burns every few years. A grass fire isn't going to cross that, even in the wind. If it does, it's in a few spots that are easy to keep up with - it's not a large flame front.

I do keep the discs on the tractor now, though, all summer unless I'm actively using something else. Much as I hate "start, pin the governor wide open, roll" style startups on the tractor, I'll do it if there's a fire and I can go get ahead of the fire line or extinguish chunks of it.

We also keep a pickup around the hill with a couple hundred gallons of water and a fire pump in the back, for similar reasons. Local fire service is good, but it's better to be able to deter and redirect things on your own - and against burning grass, you can easily do that.

> doesn't solve the problem on its own.

Nothing will completely solve the problem, but controlled burns do considerably cut down on the total area burned.[1]

1: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237866254_Effective...

In Seattle, which was one of the cities affected by this event (also on the West side of the Cascade mountain range), the previous days with triple digit temperatures occurred in 2009, 1994, and 1941. The earlier parts of this season were actually cooler than usual, and drier than usual. You would often see posts about having the coolest day in X years from weather posts (example: https://twitter.com/NWSSeattle/status/1401722154157187073).

Anecdotal but there was recently a tornado in Czechia. That's just nuts for such a region. I suspect the rate at which these anomalies will be happening will surprise many.

You can be in favour of major surgery on our civilisation to get to net-zero in order prevent climate change, and still think that this event was likely not caused by climate change.

> If there is no conclusive evidence towards either side, then why not choose the side more likely to protect humanity from further harm?

Yes, completely agreed! Now we just have to figure out which side that is.

Put another way, you'll go a long way towards wisdom when you realize both sides of most arguments believe they are arguing for what is genuinely the best option, including what will protect humanity.

I'm not a client change denier, but it's silly to argue "why don't you just do what is clearly right?" in pretty much any disagreement.

I don't agree with the idea that climate change science is shaky, but this is a bad line of argument to go down.

Here's an example of why it's a bad line to go down:

> There's no conclusive evidence God exists or not, so why not choose the side that is more likely to save your soul?

Taking Pascal's Wager regarding climate change?

I view this as separate from the debate of how serious climate change is and how much we need to intervene to address it. I'm simply pointing out that if we are to "trust the science" and seek the truth, then the reality is there is no evidence as yet that links this particular isolated event to climate change. I'm not a fan of distorting the truth to draw attention to climate change and achieve policy change as a "justifiable end".

That's what I've never got as well. "Well it could help save humanity... but dammit, what is life if I can't roll coal on some bikers!!"

I talk about both, the point particular to the specific instance of the town here:

"by definition it's about the change of the overall climate where more such events may occur than normal (but they don't come wrapped with a bow and a note saying "love: climate change"). This is another piece of evidence towards that aggregate but not uniquely identifiable as only being possible because of climate change."

There is no way to say climate change caused this particular town to burn down, just that climate change has caused more towns to burn down than average.

I don't think the problem is on the "evidence of climate change" side, I think there is plenty inclusive or exclusive of this single event. The issue with the claim "climate change literally just burnt down a town" is cities have and will burn downe pre/post climate change so even overwhelming evidence of climate change is not proof that climate change caused this particular city to burn.

Please don't make generalized dismissals, I can't be sure if I if misinterpreted, if you misinterpreted, or if we just disagree on a point - all I know is you feel misunderstood in some way.

What particularly is it you find yourself disagreeing with in my response?

* Get others to vote. Participation rates are dismal.

* Vote local, too. Change needs to be bottom-up just as much as top-down.

Or the Medieval Warm Period? [0] Or the Little Ice Age? [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Speaking of thoughtful analyses, a symbol is something that stands in for something else, either by convention or to embody something complex and esoteric into something simple and relatable. A town hitting 3 country-wide temperature records in the world's second largest country, then burning down may not be evidence of climate change, but it can certainly be symbolic of climate change. Symbols are the critical foundation of human understanding, cognition and communication, so having a powerful and appropriate symbol of a complex issue could be even better than one more data point.

No they've just burned restaurants, a couple blocks, convenience stores, a few Target's, and a couple police stations.