Burning Questions from Fire Country
07/22/2025 04:17PM ● By Jennie Lay
"Fire Weather” is one hot book that should be a priority for everyone in fire country’s must-read life kit. The nonfiction book about a megafire that swept through a company town in Canada’s Alberta tar sands reads like a dystopian thriller. But it’s real life. And when I asked author John Vaillant about what communities are failing to imagine right now when it comes to the wildfires of the future, his reply was,“Mainly, that it can happen to them, happen to you, happen to us.” After you read this interview with Vaillant and absorb his book filled with science, social studies, premonitions and warnings, save Wednesday, July 30, for an eye-opening local talk and slideshow with the author at Bud Werner Library.
Jennie Lay: There have been a lot of devastating wildfires throughout the West and around the world in recent years. What made you want to profile the 2016 Fort McMurray fire specifically?
John Vaillant: When the subarctic Canadian petro-city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was overrun by fire on an unseasonably hot May afternoon in 2016, it was clear from the fire’s intensity, and its subsequent behavior, that we were turning a corner in our relationship to fire – not just regionally, but climatically and planetarily. “Fire Weather” is an attempt to explore the causes and effects of this phenomenon, which I term ‘21st Century Fire.'
JL: Were you on the ground during the firestorm, or did you build this account of a community under siege with reporting after the smoke had settled?
JV: I was not. I was in Italy, working on a novel (talk about being out of step with the times!). That said, it would have been virtually impossible for me to get on site because the city had been declared a disaster zone and was swarming with police. The ultimate goal of the after-the-fact long-form reporter is to gather sufficient detail to make it feel as if the writer and the reader are both there. There is no magic to this, and no cheating: you just report really hard, leaving no sensory or informational stone unturned (photo/video, news reports, weather reports, interviews, Twitter and Facebook posts, etc.). I was especially proud when my very seasoned Canadian editor read the early book proposal and assumed I had been on the ground for the fire. My reporting passed the test.
JL: Since you don’t live in Fort McMurray, what were your biggest challenges to reporting this community’s traumatic story as an outsider?
JV: Oh boy. For starters, I didn’t know anyone. There were also some serious culture and class differences to overcome. Fort Mac is a conservative, religious oil town that has been bashed (often deservedly) by environmentalists for decades. So, folks up there are sensitive to and suspicious of unfamiliar reporters. Coming from Vancouver (the San Francisco/LA of Canada) as I do didn’t help. The job of the reporter though, is to first and foremost, build rapport. So, that’s what I did, one stranger at a time. As I built trust, one person would introduce me to another and, in this way, person by person, I built a web of connection and understanding through this community. There are always more interviews you can do, and angles to look at, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and I hope I drew them in the right places.
JL: What is the long-term reaction in Fort McMurray? Has anything changed there since the fire?
JV: Again, oh boy. Like, Florida, Texas and, now, the White House, Alberta has an official policy of climate denial. The Fort McMurray fire was the most expensive “natural” disaster in Canadian history, and their response was to rebuild the city the same way, and increase bitumen production, the dirtiest, most energy-intensive of all petroleum products – while laying off workers. Last summer, the city and its surrounding plants had more evacuations due to encroaching fires. Climate, and the role fossil fuels play in destabilizing it, are taboo subjects in a community where everyone’s bread and butter depends on unquestioning loyalty to an industry that generates increasingly untenable levels of CO2. The legacy of the 2016 fire remains, invisibly, in the PTSD of residents who didn’t move away altogether, and among the firefighters there who know that the weeks of toxic fumes they endured then have compromised their health and, almost certainly, shortened their lives.
JL: Fort McMurray is an isolated, rural company town built on tar sands extraction. But being a single-industry-dependent town under assault from a megafire is something that might create a similar conversation for ski towns and other tourism-centric economies. Do you have thoughts about what might have made the Fort McMurray fire and response different from what a Canadian or American Rocky Mountain ski town might experience?
JV: There are more similarities than differences. The first task is for residents, business owners and city councils to admit to themselves that what happened in L.A., Paradise, Lahaina and Fort McMurray can happen here, too. Once this sobering possibility has been accepted, the next steps are identifying (or building) evacuation routes – at least two from every community and housing development and establishing a customized evac protocol. Then, perform a house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood fire risk assessment addressing yard plantings, hazardous fuel sources, roofing and siding materials, etc. Residents can create a quite effective (and cheap) zone of protection by having a roof-mountable garden sprinkler at the ready in case of flying ash and embers. There is, however, little point to any of this if we don’t recognize and act on the overarching need to decarbonize our economy ASAP.
JL: Can you talk briefly about the connections between climate change and fires that have burned across Los Angeles, Fort McMurray and Colorado in recent years – perhaps expanding upon what you’ve called the “unknown climate?”
JV: First off, all these fires were driven by the same phenomena: intensifying heat and the drying of fuels that comes with it. The biggest challenge for humans at this point in our history is realizing that it is no longer effective to base future responses on past experience. Fire behaves differently now; that’s why I coined the term ‘21st Century Fire’ – hotter, faster, longer lasting and often accompanied by pyrocumulonimbus storm systems. In more and more cases, urban fires are simply unfightable by traditional means. We have to recognize we are entering a new and dynamic climate regime that is capable of producing weather phenomena we have never dealt with before (fire tornadoes, thirty-inch rainfalls, etc.).
JL: You round up “Fire Weather” with a reckoning. But then you found yourself in Los Angeles in January, speaking on newscasts around the world about what will likely rank as the most expensive wildfires in U.S. history as of the time we write this. Since catastrophic climate change modeling doesn’t trigger broad action, do you envision extreme climate-driven natural disasters will trigger the true reckoning?
JV: There is no way to sugarcoat the fact that we are entering a period of prolonged crisis and violent recalibration. The insurance industry as we know it is incapable of compensating losses on the scale we are now experiencing them. Making matters unnecessarily worse, is the fact that the current administration is in the process of undermining federal regulations, protections and civil services, even as it prepares for the greatest heist of public wealth since the Russian oligarchs pillaged Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We are in uncharted territory, and many millions will suffer. Now would be a good time to familiarize yourself with the methods by which corrupt leaders loot their countries and betray the trust of their citizens.
JL: What are communities failing to imagine right now when it comes to the wildfires of the future?
JV: Mainly, that it can happen to them, happen to you, happen to us.
JL: Are there any fire-prone places that feel particularly woke to these situations right now and are doing things that might make a real difference when a fire disaster comes knocking at their door?
JV: This feels like the next phase of this story: How are vulnerable, forward-looking communities preparing for these events? I think Arizona and California are way ahead of the game here with well-established warning and evacuation protocols, and crack firefighting and incident command teams. And yet, in spite of this, L.A. was still overwhelmed. That is not because of faulty firefighting. It’s because there is nothing you can do when hundred-mile-an-hour winds are driving ember blizzards into a densely populated area. It is hard to prepare for the unthinkable, but this is the task of community leaders in the 21st century. “Fire Weather” is my attempt to illuminate and accelerate this process.
Meet the author: John Vaillant presents a free live talk about “Fire Weather” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 30, in Library Hall. www.steamboatlibrary.org/fire-weather
Jennie Lay: There have been a lot of devastating wildfires throughout the West and around the world in recent years. What made you want to profile the 2016 Fort McMurray fire specifically?
John Vaillant: When the subarctic Canadian petro-city of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was overrun by fire on an unseasonably hot May afternoon in 2016, it was clear from the fire’s intensity, and its subsequent behavior, that we were turning a corner in our relationship to fire – not just regionally, but climatically and planetarily. “Fire Weather” is an attempt to explore the causes and effects of this phenomenon, which I term ‘21st Century Fire.'
JL: Were you on the ground during the firestorm, or did you build this account of a community under siege with reporting after the smoke had settled?
JV: I was not. I was in Italy, working on a novel (talk about being out of step with the times!). That said, it would have been virtually impossible for me to get on site because the city had been declared a disaster zone and was swarming with police. The ultimate goal of the after-the-fact long-form reporter is to gather sufficient detail to make it feel as if the writer and the reader are both there. There is no magic to this, and no cheating: you just report really hard, leaving no sensory or informational stone unturned (photo/video, news reports, weather reports, interviews, Twitter and Facebook posts, etc.). I was especially proud when my very seasoned Canadian editor read the early book proposal and assumed I had been on the ground for the fire. My reporting passed the test.
JL: Since you don’t live in Fort McMurray, what were your biggest challenges to reporting this community’s traumatic story as an outsider?
JV: Oh boy. For starters, I didn’t know anyone. There were also some serious culture and class differences to overcome. Fort Mac is a conservative, religious oil town that has been bashed (often deservedly) by environmentalists for decades. So, folks up there are sensitive to and suspicious of unfamiliar reporters. Coming from Vancouver (the San Francisco/LA of Canada) as I do didn’t help. The job of the reporter though, is to first and foremost, build rapport. So, that’s what I did, one stranger at a time. As I built trust, one person would introduce me to another and, in this way, person by person, I built a web of connection and understanding through this community. There are always more interviews you can do, and angles to look at, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and I hope I drew them in the right places.
JL: What is the long-term reaction in Fort McMurray? Has anything changed there since the fire?
JV: Again, oh boy. Like, Florida, Texas and, now, the White House, Alberta has an official policy of climate denial. The Fort McMurray fire was the most expensive “natural” disaster in Canadian history, and their response was to rebuild the city the same way, and increase bitumen production, the dirtiest, most energy-intensive of all petroleum products – while laying off workers. Last summer, the city and its surrounding plants had more evacuations due to encroaching fires. Climate, and the role fossil fuels play in destabilizing it, are taboo subjects in a community where everyone’s bread and butter depends on unquestioning loyalty to an industry that generates increasingly untenable levels of CO2. The legacy of the 2016 fire remains, invisibly, in the PTSD of residents who didn’t move away altogether, and among the firefighters there who know that the weeks of toxic fumes they endured then have compromised their health and, almost certainly, shortened their lives.
JL: Fort McMurray is an isolated, rural company town built on tar sands extraction. But being a single-industry-dependent town under assault from a megafire is something that might create a similar conversation for ski towns and other tourism-centric economies. Do you have thoughts about what might have made the Fort McMurray fire and response different from what a Canadian or American Rocky Mountain ski town might experience?
JV: There are more similarities than differences. The first task is for residents, business owners and city councils to admit to themselves that what happened in L.A., Paradise, Lahaina and Fort McMurray can happen here, too. Once this sobering possibility has been accepted, the next steps are identifying (or building) evacuation routes – at least two from every community and housing development and establishing a customized evac protocol. Then, perform a house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood fire risk assessment addressing yard plantings, hazardous fuel sources, roofing and siding materials, etc. Residents can create a quite effective (and cheap) zone of protection by having a roof-mountable garden sprinkler at the ready in case of flying ash and embers. There is, however, little point to any of this if we don’t recognize and act on the overarching need to decarbonize our economy ASAP.
JL: Can you talk briefly about the connections between climate change and fires that have burned across Los Angeles, Fort McMurray and Colorado in recent years – perhaps expanding upon what you’ve called the “unknown climate?”
JV: First off, all these fires were driven by the same phenomena: intensifying heat and the drying of fuels that comes with it. The biggest challenge for humans at this point in our history is realizing that it is no longer effective to base future responses on past experience. Fire behaves differently now; that’s why I coined the term ‘21st Century Fire’ – hotter, faster, longer lasting and often accompanied by pyrocumulonimbus storm systems. In more and more cases, urban fires are simply unfightable by traditional means. We have to recognize we are entering a new and dynamic climate regime that is capable of producing weather phenomena we have never dealt with before (fire tornadoes, thirty-inch rainfalls, etc.).
JL: You round up “Fire Weather” with a reckoning. But then you found yourself in Los Angeles in January, speaking on newscasts around the world about what will likely rank as the most expensive wildfires in U.S. history as of the time we write this. Since catastrophic climate change modeling doesn’t trigger broad action, do you envision extreme climate-driven natural disasters will trigger the true reckoning?
JV: There is no way to sugarcoat the fact that we are entering a period of prolonged crisis and violent recalibration. The insurance industry as we know it is incapable of compensating losses on the scale we are now experiencing them. Making matters unnecessarily worse, is the fact that the current administration is in the process of undermining federal regulations, protections and civil services, even as it prepares for the greatest heist of public wealth since the Russian oligarchs pillaged Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We are in uncharted territory, and many millions will suffer. Now would be a good time to familiarize yourself with the methods by which corrupt leaders loot their countries and betray the trust of their citizens.
JL: What are communities failing to imagine right now when it comes to the wildfires of the future?
JV: Mainly, that it can happen to them, happen to you, happen to us.
JL: Are there any fire-prone places that feel particularly woke to these situations right now and are doing things that might make a real difference when a fire disaster comes knocking at their door?
JV: This feels like the next phase of this story: How are vulnerable, forward-looking communities preparing for these events? I think Arizona and California are way ahead of the game here with well-established warning and evacuation protocols, and crack firefighting and incident command teams. And yet, in spite of this, L.A. was still overwhelmed. That is not because of faulty firefighting. It’s because there is nothing you can do when hundred-mile-an-hour winds are driving ember blizzards into a densely populated area. It is hard to prepare for the unthinkable, but this is the task of community leaders in the 21st century. “Fire Weather” is my attempt to illuminate and accelerate this process.
Meet the author: John Vaillant presents a free live talk about “Fire Weather” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 30, in Library Hall. www.steamboatlibrary.org/fire-weather