British Columbia declares a state of emergency amid devastating wildfires
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Canada:
BC Wildfire Service's Wildfire Map: https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map
BC Air Quality Health Index: https://www.env.gov.bc.ca/epd/bcairquality/readings/find-sta...
NWT Live Fire Map: https://www.gov.nt.ca/ecc/en/services/wildland-fire-update/n...
Alberta Wildfire Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3ffcc2d0ef3e4e0999b0c...
USA:
WA & OR Fire Map: https://gacc.nifc.gov/nwcc/firemap.php
ID Fire Map: https://idfg.idaho.gov/ifwis/maps/realtime/fire/
MT Interactive Fire Map: https://mtdnrc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?...
The number of fires over the past 4 decades is trending down. The numbers for area burned looks like each time there's a peak, it burns out enough fuel to make subsequent years easier. There were a couple of peaks in 1980s/1990s, but nothing that big recently.
Also, notably, the area burnt is lowest during recession years and COVID lockdown year. So when people could not afford to go camping/ATVing, the amount of fires was drastically less. Climate change probably does play some role here, but so does the 20% population increase in BC over the last 2 decades.
So, the correct question to ask is "what can we do as a reasonable trade-off to reduce the number of fires in the future without compromising the quality of life?". And the correct answer is "educate people on how to spot hazardous terrain and contain the fires they accidentally started". Requiring fire extinguishers at campsites/ATVs could help. Doing some training would help. Doing controlled burns would help. Renaming Environment Canada to "Environment and Climate Change Canada| and closing down local production in favor of Chinese imports won't.
1. The number of fires is trending down, but
2. The area burned is trending up
3. The number of fires in 2020 wasn’t noticeably different. Down but on trend. But area burned was very low
Idly I wonder if some of the worst fires are started by humans through carelessness or on purpose, and this number of fires was down in 2020? Could also be a coincidence. Some years in the past had a very low area burned with a normal number of fires.
Provincial parks were outright closed for some time. And people in general were too spooked to go grilling on a forest campsite with the entire extended family.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/susy.domenicano/viz/3...
I think this is a misleading interpretation of two (pretty vague) statistics.
How have the mitigation strategies for fire changed over the last 30 years? The area burnt may not increase but the fires may be more fierce/more difficult to control, and the lack of change in these stats may be because of control techniques being different. The same can apply for the amount of preparatory work being done (/money spent) before fire season.
Since 1996 no year had more than 5M hectares burned, and the graph (if you squint enough) does look like it's slightly trending down.
Except, enter 2023 [1]:
> As of August 17, 5,765 fires had burned 13,749,167 hectares (33,974,932 acres), about four percent of the entire forest area of Canada and more than five times the long-term average of 2.38 million ha (5.9 million acres) for that time of the year.
Want to see what an updated graph looks like? Found one here [2] - scroll down to the bottom.
It seems misleading to cite a graph ending at 2021 when we're seeing the graph shooting off the chart right in front of us.
"Our forest management practices, they've been like this since about the '80s. So why is it we're seeing the bad fire seasons now? It's because the weather has gotten more extreme."
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/wildfire-fac...
[0] https://vancouver.weatherstats.ca/charts/precipitation-month...
warmer air holds more moisture, pulling it from the ground and holding it longer. Explains drier conditions and more extreme rainfalls when they do finally occur
The entirety of BC is not currently on fire (obviously). And if "BC is on fire" right now, then it would also be "on fire" when there is one single forest fire burning in the province.
https://static.steve-adams.me/canada-fire-polys-1980-2021.gi...
The four worst forest fire seasons in BC since 1950 by square kilometers burnt are 2023, 2018, 2017, and 2021 in that order.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-wildfire-...
This is such a wild false dichotomy.
Unless you're saying climate change has nothing to do with it, or is making fires better, it's a strange thing to play devil's advocate about -- especially pre-emptively.
I accept the scientific consensus that climate change is making a lot of these natural disasters worse/different and more frequent, so addressing climate change and teaching people how to survive novel natural disasters are both important on different time scales.
This is Canada you're talking about. We have no idea how to do anything but destroy our own economy by offshoring.
I get a slope of 61,783 ± 31,227 for that data via linear regression. That means 2,471,320 HA more per year burning now compared to 40 years ago.
It wasn't exceeding 1.8M HA per year in the 80s+90s other than the peaks in 89, 94/95, and 99. It exceeded that amount 13 times since 2002.
The average fit yearly burn has increased from 1.2M HA in 1980 to 3.6M HA in 2023.
That is 62 degrees from the equator, 20,000 people.
Air quality in much of Western Canada is horrific.
They've always been present, yes, especially towards the eastern side of the Cascades, but the past few years have felt like a different beast.
Field burning used to be a more common thing though, so it was a regular annual occurrence that you'd have a lot of smoke in the air during field burning season.
Fire here has always been common, the most common pine tree requires fire to open it's pine cones. Fires starting here always sparks climate change battles. The reality is that there has and will always be fire here.
Take care.
"OKANOGAN COUNTY, Wash. — The Crater Creek fire, that has burned an estimated 54,000 acres in British Columbia, has entered into Okanogan County." https://inx.lv/mi5t
Someone grabbed this[0] eerie shot of the town of Osoyoos across from Osoyoos Lake.
Some of the places burning are places fuel management has been done and some of these places already burned up a few times over the last 10 years.
Also helicopters are not our problem heavy winds was grounding them anyways.
On another note, fire is a natural part of a forests life. If we rush to put out everything which is not near cities or buildings, we are just pushing things back until the next fire in the area is even worse. It is better for the forest to burn a bit.
Trees that excel on wet ground will be better fire breaks because their fuel is higher in the tree and the ground is wet. Yeah that helps as a fire break but it is not some super power. In my area you will naturally get small clumps of large aspens and then a lot of small aspen bushes. Those smaller trees/bushes burn up like anything else and they help guide the fires to their more resistant big brothers.
The fires happening around my city blew through a place I know well, it has a lot of aspen and swamps. The fire destroyed it all, maybe the aspen helped but not in a meaningful way. When the smoke clears maybe the picture will be different.
It is not realistic to assume that if we let aspen do what it wishes that it will make fire breaks that are of real value. Aspen is like a weed and if you cut all the trees down in an area the aspen bushes start to take over. That being said, a diverse forest is always going to be a better forest.
Scientists develop sophisticated models that show the dangers of global warming "We'll deal with it before it becomes a problem."
The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely time for gradual, market-based solutions to global warming."
I'm a little sour on this term because it acts (consciously or unconsciously) to deflect from the actual problem of large-scale desiccation. Every time I hear it makes me think of someone saying 'Mars never has forest fires, because the vegetation has been cleared properly.'
Forests naturally burn. In California (at least) trees have features specifically evolved to fit into an environment with periodic natural fires. There are written reports of fires in North America going back many hundreds of years, and I believe the natives experienced fires before that as well, as evidenced by cultural practices and oral history.
So you can either not manage the forests and avoid building into areas that would be affected by natural fires, or you can build into those areas but you do need to manage the forests.
Where do you get the idea that forests don’t need to be managed if we are to live in and around them? It seems like magical thinking to me.
Note that this is orthogonal to the effect a warming earth has on severity. Qualitatively, you needed to manage forests in North America 1,000 years ago, and you still need to manage them today.
Yes, this is what I have in mind. If you want to live in a forest you need to assume you'll be on your own in the case of natural disasters and have some survival/escape plan. Building into/exploiting all available primeval land seems like a Bad Thing to me.
it goes well beyond that, the bark beetles have killed a lot of pine trees, which is just standing dead timber. now dry that out and you have dead forests full of kindling.
The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely happening, but it’s too late to do anything about it, so let’s just live it up until extinction."
seems like there's still plenty of denial to go around
Scientists treat their jobs as sinecure, benefit from unpublished data and closed-source code while receiving public funding
Nothing to see here, people, get that Believe Science t-shirt and move on.
> The catastrophic consequences are now being felt on a regular basis "Okay, it's definitely time for gradual, market-based solutions to global warming."
I guess you disagree with economists who won the most prestigious award in their field and who also build sophisticated models? Pick your own dismal science to root for! Being a science believer have never been so exciting, now you can treat it like football or politics!
The "dismal's" fine, it's "science" where they patently prevaricate.
;)
So far, air quality in the PNW isn't too bad, this is barely notable compared to past years. Hopefully it stays this way.
What's burning, at least nearby, is not forests AFAIK, it's grasslands.
Good luck out there.
I know little about these air quality sites, how accurate they are, or if they are all measuring the same things in a normalized way. I just latched on to the PurpleAir info, as I'd at least once seen the site favorably mentioned here on HN and the UI is pretty tolerable to me. If the world is going to burn around me I should probably study-up on such things rather than, oh, on the latest Scala db access lib. :-) The local media is referencing aqi.in as a source, not sure if this is related to your aqicn one:
"SPOKANE, Wash. - Five of the top ten cities with the worst air quality in the world are in the Spokane Metro area, according to aqi.in. Mead sits at number one with an AQI of 502. Spokane is number four with an AQI of 444. Airway Heights is ranked sixth with an AQI of 426. Spokane Valley sits at number eight with an AQI 392. Cheney is sitting at number ten with an AQI of 370." https://inx.lv/mi5K [khq.com]
The outside light this afternoon was truly dim due to the haze - I could see smoke in the air less than 50' away. Eyes watering, awful smell ... I can't imagine what that AQI=1000 Beijing experience would have been like ... almost seems non-survivable, at least if it's the same sort of pollutants. We're getting organic ash (yes, we paid xtra for it!) from grass/trees/shrubbery &etc but also getting the combustion products from hundreds of houses+vehicles that have gone up in flames over the past few days. All kinds of plastics and rubber and electronics ingredients I would think.
I haven't heard if all this is going to blow towards Seattle or PDX but if it does they're not gonna be happy. We'll have to figure out how to blame it on Canadians if it does cross the Cascades.
An AQI of 1000 typically means a dust storm in Beijing blowing in from the Gobi desert, or, conversely, very stagnant air with almost no wind. It’s a weird experience, but survivable.
It's going to suck for a couple days, I think.