Ashes upon ashes leave us all charred and scarred

Opinion

As I write this, I’m in Newfoundland, waiting.

Waiting near the edge of a forest-fire evacuation zone, waiting to see if the one last building — a small barn — at our place in Newfoundland has burned down. Hoping it hasn’t.

You’ve heard this before.

In May, I wrote about a wildfire that burned down our Newfoundland house and the shed over our root cellar. It burned down 12 homes in Small Point-Adam’s Cove, and nearly 50 other buildings.

But that was just the beginning.

In early August, another wildfire — this one massive — hit the same area, Conception Bay North (CBN). The fire is still out of control as I write. The damage so far is staggering. In total, 196 dwellings and over 700 structures burned down. A school — a pharmacy — a meeting hall — a clinic — a post office. The core of several communities.

The personal losses have also been staggering — decades of memories destroyed, generations of personal history lost. More than 10,000 hectares of land burned black — land that, on Newfoundland’s unforgiving coast, will take decades to recover.

I can attest to the fact it is a gutting loss.

Even if you’re among the lucky residents whose houses didn’t burn, you’re affected. Even if you’re hundreds of miles from forest fires, you’ll be affected as well.

But even if you’re among the lucky CBN residents whose houses didn’t burn, you’re affected. Even if you’re hundreds of miles from forest fires, you’ll be affected as well.

For those in the evacuation area for the CBN fire, electrical power had been turned off to help firefighting efforts. Fridges and freezers are full of spoiled food and may have to be written off, and there’s the risk of damage from weeks of wildfire smoke. Wells have to be tested for contamination by heavy metals leaching from burned properties and also for the presence of certain firefighting products.

The costs spiral outwards.

There’s the cost to utilities: the fire damaged or destroyed over 200 hydro poles, all of which have to be replaced and have power lines restrung. Newfoundland Power has already said it will go to the province’s public utilities board to recover those costs. Wired internet services have also been significantly damaged — costs that will also have to be recouped. Municipal water systems have been damaged.

Then there’s the cost of fighting the fires: fuel for water bombers, pay for ground crews, remuneration for additional air resources (such as heavy-lift helicopters) and to repair fire equipment damaged or destroyed by blazes. There’s also the cost of consumables for volunteer firefighters — from fuel to firefighting foam to socks — who have been fighting the CBN blaze for weeks.

And still the costs spread outward: the provincial government has to cover the cost of the evacuation of thousands of people, along with providing supports to help those who have suffered losses.

Then, perhaps even closer to home, insurance. Put a nominal value of $350,000 on the loss of a house and its contents. (For the purpose of cost, assuming all homeowners were insured. Tragically, they weren’t.) The current CBN fire would be a $70-million fire, losses that will show up on the bills of insurance customers.

Fires have raged all summer in Manitoba, covering much of the province in smoke, and more have burned in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. At this point, with 7.9 million hectares scorched, this is the second-worst year for forest fires in Canada since 1970. (The worst was just two years ago, when 17.3 million hectares burned.)

After Nova Scotia put a ban on being in the woods due to drought conditions, social media exploded with people complaining that their inalienable rights to risk their neighbours’ safety were being infringed upon. Nova Scotia now has the Long Lake fire west of Dalhousie, and on Tuesday that fire had burned more than 8,000 hectares and fire experts were predicting it would be a long-running fire. Homes have been damaged and destroyed, but the fire is so dangerous it’s impossible to fully assess the extent of damage.

It’s been a very dry year across much of Canada, with regions in several provinces experiencing extreme drought.\

All of these costs will come home to roost. They’ll be on tax bills, on your home insurance, on your hydro bill.

It’s everybody’s problem, because this type of weather is the expected result of climate change, and its arrival has been forecasted for over a decade.

To recoup: all of these costs will come home to roost. They’ll be on tax bills, on your home insurance, on your hydro bill. While it’s more tangential, you can even factor in increased health impacts for everything from wildfire smoke exposure to stress and other mental-health concerns.

Right now, the area scorched by the CBN fire is still evacuated.

I know, all too well, the heartache that will come when that evacuation order is lifted, and those who lost homes return — to sift through the ashes to find whatever scraps have survived from their razed dwellings.

There will be heartbreakingly little — a cardboard box or two of mostly metal items; perhaps something as dainty as a porcelain plate, already accustomed to the heat of fire.

I can only hope we won’t be facing this experience for the second time in just four months. After all, the scraps left after the first fire — small blackened treasures — are in a couple of cardboard boxes in the barn. We may be searching through ashes for them all over again.

Sadly, next year and the year after, we won’t be alone in that.