Burned into memory

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/05/2021 (1621 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Where there’s smoke, there’s a good chance you’ll find a wildfire.

That’s just a tragic fact of life throughout much of the world as drought-like conditions fuel uncontrolled fires that consume acres of forest and threaten lives.

In this province, several communities were poised for potential evacuations earlier this week while others declared states of emergency as wildfires raged in southern Manitoba.

Clouds of smoke led to highway closures and prompted Environment Canada to issue special air-quality statements for much of southern Manitoba Monday.

“Localized areas of smoke are creating reduced visibilities and poor air quality downwind of fires,” the weather office warned. “Wildfire smoke is a constantly changing mixture of particles and gasses which includes many chemicals that can harm your health.”

In Saskatchewan, a wildfire spanning more than 40 kilometres prompted the City of Prince Albert to declare a local state of emergency on Monday. The fire forced at least 50 people from their homes by Tuesday afternoon. Residents of the Berg subdivision in the RM of Garden River were ordered to evacuate Wednesday morning.

In Russia, meanwhile, some parts of the country were reporting a record number of spring wildfires, and smoke plumes from some Siberian fires have drifted across half the nation and been spotted over Finland.

It’s early in the season, but hopefully none of these blazes will rival the destruction of those on today’s smoking list of Five Infamous Wildfires from Around The World:

5) The infamous wildfire: The 1950 Chinchaga firestorm

Where there’s smoke: In the summer of 1950, something decidedly strange started happening in cities and towns in Ontario and across the northeastern United States. “In the middle of the day, it started to get dark — so dark, in fact, that cities like Toronto had to turn on their streetlights.

The sun turned blue and receded behind a dark haze, sparking fears that the government was testing a secret weapon or worse, that the country was under nuclear attack,” the science website phys.org recalls. In reality, the explanation had nothing to do with a secret government weapon. The cause was a gigantic pall of smoke emanating from an out-of-control wildfire spanning northern B.C. and Alberta. The smoke encircled the northern part of the globe as it was carried by jetstreams to Europe before wrapping back around to the Yukon.

The Chinchaga River fire of 1950 swept across a stunning 4.2 million acres of forest in northern B.C. and Alberta, and remains the largest single recorded wildfire in North America to date. Amazingly, no one was killed by the massive blaze that created the world’s largest smoke layer in the atmosphere, known as the “1950 Great Smoke Pall.” In a 2015 book on the blaze, Cordy Tymstra, an Alberta government wildfire science co-ordinator, said Chinchaga, named for a river in northwestern Alberta, likely started from fires set by seismic crews looking for oil and gas near the B.C.-Alberta border.

The fire began on June 1 and was allowed to burn freely, a result of local forest management policy and the lack of settlements in the region. It finally was put out by cooler weather and rain in late October, as it approached Keg River in the Whispering River area. Chinchaga “gives you an indication of what fire can do, and then you throw into the equation climate change. Fires are getting hotter, bigger and faster, and the Chinchaga fire showed this is what can happen if you don’t suppress fire when you can,” Tymstra said.

2) The infamous wildfire: The Peshtigo Fire of 1871

Where there’s smoke: Even if you’ve spent most of your life hiding in a drainpipe — and these days no one could blame you — chances are you’ve heard of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. That infamous fire claimed the lives of about 300 people and, according to popular myth, was started by a cow tipping over a lantern. If it wasn’t for that headline-making blaze, a lot more people would be familiar with a massive wildfire that started the very same day,

Oct. 8, 1871 — the Peshtigo Fire, which claimed at least 1,200 lives (and likely more) and is ranked as the deadliest wildfire in American history. According to The National Weather Service, the story of the Peshtigo Fire, gleaned from survivor accounts and conjecture, is that railroad workers clearing land for tracks that evening started a brush fire which, fanned by strong winds, became an inferno.

The blaze that wiped out Peshtigo, Wis., was voracious. It scorched 1.2 million acres in Wisconsin and Michigan, although it skipped over the waters of Green Bay to burn parts of Door and Kewaunee counties. The damage estimate was put at $169 million, about the same as for the Chicago Fire. The fire also burned 16 other towns, but the damage in Peshtigo was the worst. The city was gone in an hour. In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost.

“The sudden, convulsive speed of the flames consumed available oxygen. Some trying to flee burst into flames,” according to the weather service. It had been an unusually dry summer, and the fire moved so fast that some survivors said it moved “like a tornado.” According to the Green Bay Press-Gazette: “There’s the story of a man carrying a woman to safety he thought was his wife. When he found out it wasn’t her, he went crazy. People said the Peshtigo River was the only haven from the fire, and one 13 year-old German immigrant girl said she held onto the horn of a cow all night in the river to survive.”

3) The infamous wildfire: Australia’s Black Saturday bushfires

Where there’s smoke: Anyone who has watched TV news or cracked open a newspaper in the past year knows that Australia is no stranger to devastating wildfires. Last year marked one of Australia’s worst fire seasons on record, with an area larger than Portugal going up in flames.

But even in a country used to fiery disasters, Feb. 7, 2009 — forever known as “Black Saturday” — burns in their collective memory. That was the day of the deadliest bushfire event in the country’s fiery history. It has been branded as “one of the darkest days in Australia’s peacetime history,” because the fires, fuelled by a record-shattering heat wave, claimed 173 lives across the state of Victoria.

“It was like the gates of hell. There is no other way to describe it,” is what bed-and-breakfast owner Tony Thomas told the BBC in 2019. “It came out of the forest behind us on the other side — at 100 (kilometres) it just roared towards us.” As many as 400 individual bushfires were reportedly ignited that day as Australia saw its highest temperatures since records were first kept in 1859. Some of the blazes were caused by faulty power lines and some by lightning, but cases of arson were also reported. The toll was staggering, even for a country long used to devastating bushfires.

The numbers are shocking — a total of 173 people died and it left several hundreds more injured, with more than 2,000 homes destroyed, and more than 7,500 people displaced. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimated that up to one million animals died in the fires. “Over the years, Australia has been hit with several deadly blazes. But the Black Saturday fires of 2009 were singular in their ferocity — equal to 1,500 atomic bombs,” according to the BBC. “Our world turned from beautiful colours to black and grey,” Mr. Thomas told the BBC. “There wasn’t a spot on the property that wasn’t burnt and it was the same across the whole area.”

2) The infamous wildfire: The Fort McMurray wildfire

Where there’s smoke: It may sound trite, but it was a terrifying time that has been seared into the memories of most Canadians. Five years ago this month, more than 80,000 residents of the Alberta city of Fort McMurray were forced to flee one of the worst wildfires in Canadian history, a massive blaze that became known simply as “The Beast.”

The fire started on May 1, 2016 and swept through the community, forcing residents to flee their homes on May 3. Some communities had already been evacuated prior to May 3, but that Tuesday, officials decided they couldn’t guarantee the safety of any “Fort Mac” resident from a fire that had doubled in size in a manner of hours that morning, and at one point crossed Highway 63, the only major evacuation route south.

By Wednesday, the size of the blaze in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo had reached between 18,000 and 25,000 acres, defying firefighting efforts. Wildfires merged and the flames continued to spread, eventually reaching in excess of 1.4 million acres. Neighbouring communities, First Nations and oil camps also left, while more firefighters poured in from around the world. At its peak, 2,000 firefighters were battling the blaze daily.

In what has to be a miracle, no one died in the fires, although two people were killed in a crash during evacuations. In total, an estimated 2,400 buildings burned to the ground and another 500 were damaged. Five years later, it remains the most expensive natural disaster in Canada’s history at an estimated cost in excess of $9 billion. Residents began to return June 1, but the fire was considered out of control until early July and was not fully extinguished until August. Dutchess Sabovitch fled the fire with her husband on a motorcycle, driving through ash and flames and gridlock on the only highway out of town. “It was quite frightening,” she told the CBC. “I remember my husband being quite stiff on the motorcycle.”

1) The infamous wildfire: The 2018 Camp fire in California

Where there’s smoke: On a cool November morning in 2018, a wildfire was born in a remote stretch of canyon in Butte County, Calif., an area nestled against the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Ignited by a faulty power line, fuelled by drought conditions, and driven by powerful winds, the flames travelled rapidly, moving at a reported 80 football fields a minute.

In less than 24 hours, the Camp fire — named after Camp Creek Road, its place of origin — had swept through the town of Paradise and other communities, leaving a charred ruin in its wake. It was the costliest disaster worldwide in 2018, with a reported $8.4 billion in insured losses.

The human toll was more devastating — 85 people died, some in their cars as they were trying to escape, making it the single deadliest wildfire in California history. It burned 153,336 acres (about the size of Chicago), and destroyed nearly 19,000 structures (14,000 of which were homes). While it was contained on Nov. 25, search-and-rescue efforts continued into December. Not since the Cloquet Fire in 1918 in Minnesota, where 453 people died, has a wildfire killed so many people in the United States. “I was in the hospital for a week after that (Camp fire), getting my dead skin scrubbed off my arms. It was terrible,” Erin Coyle, 24, told reporters of the day her family’s home was consumed.

A nearly 100-year-old electrical transmission line owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric was identified as the cause of the Camp Fire after an investigation by California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It took four hours to rip through the town of Paradise. “Our Air Tac officer gave a report — where the fire was and how much was being impacted. He basically said, ‘The fire’s progressed all the way through town,’” Cal Fire Division Chief John Messina told the news program Frontline. “By noon, we had conceded that the town had basically burned down.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca