John Vaillant’s ‘Fire Weather,’ a real-life thriller and wake-up call

Vaillant’s nemesis of choice is more elusive and more imperceptible than it may at first appear. “Our experience of fire occurs in the realm of the visible,” he writes, “but it is made possible by the invisible” — by oxygen in the atmosphere, declining humidity levels, rising temperatures and the ever-expanding catalogue of flammable petroleum products that we wear and use on a daily basis.

“Fire Weather” drags all of these abstractions into the spotlight, then turns its attention to another potent invisibility: Not only are the sources of increasing threats from fires out of sight and therefore out of mind (at least until rampant wildfires in Canada bathe the entire East Coast and Mid-Atlantic in toxic fumes), but environmental crises in general, and forest fires in particular, are unthinkably huge and horrific. A conflagration in the subarctic Canadian region of Alberta, in 2001, was so explosive that its volatility was, per Vaillant, “difficult to express in ordinary thermal terms.” “If you’re having trouble imagining a quarter of a million space heaters compressed into the length of a yardstick and then multiplied by several miles, you’re not alone,” he concedes. Chroniclers resorted to new units of measurement: Scientists determined that, at the fire’s peak, the energy it released was equivalent to the amount that would be released by “four Hiroshima bombs per minute.”

But even this comparison is unhelpfully notional. What does the energy of four atomic bombs look like? More palpable is the intimate, experiential language favored by a pilot who flew over the flames and remarked, almost lyrically, “I have to be careful because the plane is going to crumple up like a butterfly.”

Vaillant’s narrative, which also takes place in Alberta, begins in May 2016, when the region was unusually hot and dry. Fires are a regular and natural occurrence in that part of the world — they are the subarctic forest’s way of revitalizing itself, and native flora have adapted to withstand them — but in recent years, blazes have been unprecedentedly frequent and extreme. That spring, “winter snowfall had been far below average for two years running,” and a perfect storm was brewing. A fire was crackling, and winds were gusting toward the small city of Fort McMurray.

The city’s authorities had all of the relevant information at their fingertips, but as the flames advanced, they remained in a state of disbelief and paralysis. By the end of the debacle, the Fort McMurray fire was unspeakable because of its inhuman intensity; at the beginning, it was unspeakable because the mayor and the fire chief refused to speak about it. “Something that is ‘infandous’ is a thing too horrible to be named or uttered,” Vaillant writes. Everyone in charge in Fort McMurray found the looming inferno infandous, and “Fire Weather” slows almost to a standstill as the crisis builds, unbearable and looming. “The energy releasing at lunchtime on May 3 was equivalent to a nuclear explosion,” Vaillant reports. The fire was a “half mile west of the only road out of town.” Meanwhile, fire chief Darby Allen was still counseling residents to go about their days as usual. It is impossible to keep reading, impossible to stop.

By the afternoon, the smoke was visible on the horizon. A firefighter “in the midst of showing his pumper truck to a class of kindergarteners” turned and glimpsed a black mass. A wife and husband were packing up their belongings when the woman turned and cried, “The fire!” Her husband replied soothingly, “I know there’s a fire coming, but it’s not a big deal.” “No! You don’t understand,” she screamed. “The fire’s on our street!” An evacuation order was not issued until 2 p.m., by which time the suburbs were already engulfed. “The citizenry of Fort McMurray discovered that their city was burning mostly by personal observation and word of mouth.”

Tragic incongruities multiplied as evacuees clung to consoling mundanities, relics of the normal life they had been leading until just moments prior. The owner of a dry-cleaning store shrieked “Get out, get out, get out” on the phone to his wife, then turned to a client and asked if she could pick up her garments on Tuesday.

Given the ferocity of the blaze that bore down on the city, it is miraculous that there were no fire-related deaths during the sudden and haphazard exodus of 90,000 people that ensued. As a long line of cars wound down the highway, the streets behind them were rapidly becoming unrecognizable. “Neighborhoods once distinguished by tidy uniformity” were transforming into “suburban Hells rendered by Salvador Dali.” Household fixtures melted and writhed into monstrous forms. Soon, gas stations were exploding, and cars and propane tanks affixed to grills were no more than “flying shrapnel.” The fire “created its own weather,” as one harrowed survivor told Vaillant. Entire houses disappeared in close to five minutes. The same fire chief who had lately reassured residents started calling the fire “the beast.”

Normal tactics were paltry defenses against such a fiend. “Most of the hose streams deployed were evaporating long before they reached the flames,” and hydrants were running dry. The department of forestry, expert in combating conflagrations in the woods, teamed up with the fire department, expert in stamping out urban blazes, to face a situation that neither was equipped to handle: a forest fire in a city. Responders were forced to devise new strategies on the spot, many of them failures. The beast was not contained until a month later and “would not be declared fully extinguished until August of the following year.” “With the sole exception of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” Vaillant writes, “no modern North American city has been disinhabited for so long.”

“Fire Weather” mounts a systematic investigation into all the factors that conspired to wreak such havoc on Fort McMurray. A book about an isolated disaster thereby unfurls into a book about boreal forest ecosystems, the chemistry of combustion, the flammability of modern furniture, the history of environmental exploitation in Alberta, the climactic conditions that are making forest fires increasingly dangerous and ubiquitous, and much more — at times, too much more. I could have done without quite so many forays into the origins of climate science or quite so many reminders that the admittedly colossal mismanagement in Fort McMurray resembles the no less colossal mismanagement ongoing worldwide. Lectures about how officials in both local and global cases have turned a blind eye to impending catastrophe serve only to reiterate the obvious — and, worse, to transform an account of a painfully particular horror into a generic admonition. “Fire Weather” fails when it trades in familiar warnings, which are easily relegated to the dustbin of the mind. It succeeds when it concretizes the unimaginable in terms that seize readers by the throat.

There is a second nefarious immensity that is hard to picture, and it, too, is converted into something tangible and terrifying in “Fire Weather.” “When it comes to rapidly and radically altering a landscape along with the lives of those who live upon it,” Vaillant warns, “only a few things compare to a big boreal fire, and one of them is the profit motive.” The truth is, “we are fire’s kin — gas-driven, fuel-burning, heat-generating appetites who will burn as bright and hot as we can, stopping at nothing until we’re fully extinguished.” But even with the aid of a good metaphor, we may not feel the searing heat of our own rapaciousness until it is too late.

Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.

A True Story From a Hotter World