Why the Canadian wildfires are still burning — and sending smoke across the U.S.
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With hundreds of Canadian wildfires sending smoke across the northern United States, many Americans are wondering how long the bad air quality will continue and whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government can do more to put out the flames.
While Canada does have a policy of letting fires in some remote areas burn out on their own, the government has also simply been overmatched by this year’s record-breaking fire season, which has so far burned more than 32,000 square miles.
Canada is also contending with other limitations and challenges — some of which are of its own making. Here’s a rundown:
The fires are incredibly widespread and constantly starting anew
As of Monday, there are 584 active fires in Canada, including three that started today, up from 501 last Thursday, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Of those, 285 are considered “out of control,” 195 and are “under control,” and 104 are “being held.”
As fires get put out, new ones keep starting. The country has seen a total of 3,255 fires so far this year, and have burned an area roughly as large as the state of South Carolina — making this already the worst fire season in Canadian history — and summer has just begun.
Some of the fires hard to reach, and resources are limited
With a landmass second only to Russia, but with a population just one-ninth that of the U.S., Canada finds itself short of the manpower, money and equipment needed to effectively counter the extent of this summer’s wildfires.
“Massive fires burning in remote areas — like some of those currently burning in northwestern Quebec — are often too out of control to do anything about,” CNN reported on Saturday.
“With so many fires across the whole country, resources are scarce,” Dustan Mueller, a U.S. Forest Service deputy fire chief who has been in Canada assisting with its firefighting effort, told the Guardian.
“If you have limited resources, and you have a lot of fires, what you do is you protect human life and property first,” Robert Gray, a Canadian wildland fire ecologist, told CNN. “You protect people, infrastructure, watersheds, so there’s a prioritization system.”
The weather, and climate change, are a factor
“Scientists say that climate change is making weather conditions like heat and drought that lead to wildfires more likely,” the BBC reported in June. “Spring in Canada has been much warmer and drier than usual, creating a tinder-dry environment for these vast fires.”
“Given how much energy these fires have while they burn, it is pretty much impossible for them to stop unless large swaths of heavy rains come their way,” Apostolos Voulgarakis, a professor of climate change at Imperial College London, told Newsweek.
Unfortunately, the forecast for the rest of the summer in Canada “is for hot and mostly dry” weather, Canadian fire scientist Mike Flannigan told the Associated Press last Thursday. “It’s a crazy year and I’m not sure where it’s going to end.”
Lack of federal coordination
Each Canadian province is responsible for fighting wildfires within its borders, so, for example, the neighboring provinces of Quebec and Ontario have no coordination to their responses to fires that may even span their border.
“It has been an issue because we don’t have a strong federal government and it’s left us in this mess right now,” Gray told ABC News.
The good news
Canada is getting a little help from its friends. “U.S., Australian, New Zealand, South African, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mexican, Chilean and Costa Rican firefighters have joined the struggle in Canada,” the Guardian reported last Thursday. “But Canadian policies, determined by each individual province, required some shifts in strategy.”
American firefighters were surprised to find that in Canada they are expected to stop after a 12-hour shift, and that protecting timber on private land is not considered a priority north of the border, given limited resources.
Doing better next time
Experts say that eastern Canadian provinces such as Quebec should start imitating their western counterparts and start deliberately burning out the underbrush every year before fire season starts, as Indigenous communities did for millennia.
“In the wildlands of the Quebec forests there is no prescribed program to clean up the forest floor,” John Gradek, a lecturer at McGill University in Montreal, told ABC News.
