Even there when a fire is burning totally out of control, firefighters just can’t get in the way of that. Well, the truth is we’ve never been able to put fires like this out, ever, even in California where we have the most advanced wildland firefighting system anywhere in the world. And I wanted to ask you the same question my colleagues put to these firefighters, which is, how do we finally put these fires out? david wallace-wells So after that show, my colleagues, Carlos Prieto and Asthaa Chaturvedi, started calling firefighters who were fighting fires in Canada. And of course, it had come from forest fires in Canada, which continue today to burn out of control. At the time, New York City was this kind of angry orange color. So David, the last time you and I spoke, it was about the smoke that was covering huge parts of the United States. With how much activity that they had up there, they could have had every firefighter in the world up there, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to help just with how much activity and how much fire is burning up there right now. At that point, sometimes it’s an even lost cause, and then you’re going to need what we call a season-ending event and that’s going to require the turn of the season - rain and snow - to actually put it out. And they’re so big, and they’re growing at such a rate. We were just kind of barely holding onto it, just keeping it at ease. And the line held, which is really nice because there was a lot of chaotic days where it was so short-staffed. And I think it was on day 10, we finally got all the way around the fire. So that was the main resource we were trying to protect just because it’s kind of bloodline for northern Canada and up to Alaska.Īnd yeah, we were just pulling long shifts, 20-hour shifts, 18-hour shifts, 17-hour shifts, back to 20 trying to contain it. It was right along the Alaska Canadian Highway. And the fire kept throwing spots, hot embers into unburned fuels.Īnd we were just running around trying to contain them all. It was really volatile, burning really quick. So I spent like 11 days on one fire, and it was kind of a chaos. I ended up jumping a fire that went pretty big. The grass is burning right on top of the water, which is pretty wild to see. It’s so dry and windy that it’s burning the grass right over a swamp. You say anywhere from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM, 6:00 PM is kind of when the fire would pick up and kind of stand up and move. Just fire or burnt country right across the landscape. One of the surprising things is how vast British Columbia is. The fire itself from flying where we were, you could nearly go as far as the eye can see. And usually, if you can see flame from the air when you’re flying, it means it’s pretty intense on the ground. You can see flames right up through the air. It did look quite confronting when we arrived to our fire. And then another thing in Canada, they have a lot of access to helicopters and air resources because a lot of that stuff is pretty remote. There’s people that operate chainsaws, and there’s other people that man the pump and hose and then hand tools. We all kind of have our duties and our roles. From there, we were kitted out with all the equipment we needed and basically began working as soon as we got there. When we got to Edmonton, we were briefed on our individual assignments. And I think there’s like French and South African. Yeah, they need all hands on deck, really. So I was there for 14 operational periods. In June, we went up there for a total of 19 days, and there was probably another 30 smokejumpers from the other bases that were up there during my time as well. I started fire when I was 19, right out of high school and currently on a wildfire right now. So I’m Jake Murry I work with the Alaska Smokejumpers. I’m a fire aviation specialist with the New South Wales rural fire service based here in Sydney. So we’re an initial attack resource that responds to usually remote lightning fires by airplane and parachute. I’m a senior smokejumper for Boise Bureau of Land Management. I’m the assistant base manager with the Boise BLM Smokejumpers. Today, we talk to firefighters on the front lines about the enormity of their challenge, and to climate columnist David Wallace-Wells about how, thanks to climate change, the very nature of the danger from wildfires is shifting. The scale has forced an international response and a re-evaluation of how the world manages wildfires. The wildfires that have swept Canada this summer have become the largest in modern history. Transcript Fighting Canada’s Unending Fires Inside the largest wildfires in the country’s modern history - and how climate change has affected its ability to deal with them.
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