Summary of Fire Weather by John Vaillant: A True Story from a Hotter World

By Justin Reese

DISCLAIMER

This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Fire Weather by John Vaillant: A True Story from a Hotter World

 

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

John Vaillant's book, The Tiger and The Golden Spruce, is a stunning account of a colossal wildfire that collided with Fort McMurray, Canada, in May 2016. It warns that this was not a unique event, but a preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. Vaillant takes us on a journey through the histories of North America's oil industry and climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: jUSTIN REESE
• Release date: Jun 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223645962

Book preview

PROLOGUE

On a hot afternoon in May 2016, a small wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta, rapidly expanded its territory through a mixed forest. Firefighters were dispatched and the fire grew from 4 acres to 150 in two hours. By noon the following day, the fire had expanded to nearly 2,000 acres. This rapid growth coincided with a rash of broken temperature records across the North American subarctic, leading to a regional apocalypse that drove serial firestorms through the city for days. This fire-driven weather system generated hurricaneforce winds and lightning that ignited still more fires miles away.

The Fort McMurray Fire was the largest single-day evacuation in modern fire history, with nearly 100,000 people forced to flee. The toll of the fire was devastating, with 2,500 homes destroyed, thousands more damaged, and 2,300 square miles of forest burned. The fire was destined to become the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history, burning for months. The Fort McMurray Fire was a direct hit on Canada's petroleum industry, symbolizing the synergy between hydrocarbon extraction and greenhouse gas emissions. It was a new kind of fire, rewriting the book on how wildfires live and die by the weather.

1

Canada is a country with 10 percent of the world's forests, with vast tracts of which are uninhabited. To understand the magnitude of the country, one must drive from Great Falls, Montana to Coutts, Alberta. The route takes one through the western edge of the Prairies, through Lethbridge, Calgary, and Red Deer. Along the way, one crosses an unmarked divide where deer give way to moose, crows give way to ravens, and coyotes give way to wolves. By the time one stops for coffee in Indian Cabins, the odometer is approaching one thousand miles.

The landlocked subarctic is home to the world's largest beaver dam, the world's largest known beaver dam, and the world's largest known boreal forest. The boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, covering almost a third of the planet's total forest area and covering a third of Canada. Rob Mark, an adventurous man from New Jersey, was the first person to visit it in 2010 and found the foliage thick and difficult to walk on. The boreal forest is the largest terrestrial ecosystem, containing more sources of fresh water than any other biome. The circumboreal forest is a hemispheric sponge covered in trees that gather, store, filter, and flush fresh water.

Billions of birds live in and migrate through the ecosystem, and it is designed to burn down on a regular basis. In North America, the epicenter for these stratospheric explosions is northern Alberta, where fires can burn thousands of square miles of forest and still be out of control. The Chinchaga Fire of 1950 was the largest fire ever recorded in North America, impacting approximately 4 million acres of forest. The Chinchaga Fire was a colossal plume that caused birds to roost at midday and created weird visual effects. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and fire scientists from Canada and Mexico issue the North American Seasonal Fire Assessment and Outlook, which predicts the likelihood of wildfires across the continent.

Fort McMurray is an anomaly in North America, located six hundred miles north of the U.S. border and six hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. Without the lure of petroleum, this part of Alberta would resemble Siberia. Fort McMurray is home to an international population of nearly 90,000 people living in 25,000 houses and buildings. Fort McMurray is a remote, industry-oriented, testosterone-heavy place located in Canada. It has become the fourthlargest city in the North American subarctic after Edmonton, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, and is the hardest-working, highest-paid municipality on the continent.

In 2016, the median household income was still nearly $200,000 a year, and Shandra Linder, a labor relations adviser, had called Fort Mac home for nearly twenty years. She is fit and warm and does not suffer fools, but to an outsider it might be surprising to see someone so polished in such a remote, industry-oriented, testosterone-heavy place. Shandra Linder works full-time for Syncrude or its larger counterpart, Suncor, which confers a blue-chip status on its employees. They wear their company badges like team colors, and the company asks a lot in return. Over the weekend, the Linders hosted friends who had evacuated due to another fire burning near the new Stonecreek development north of downtown.

They took photos of the big plume developing across the river and ate chicken and rice, and got a convivial buzz on. The Linders and their guests were in Fort McMurray, Alberta, where Forestry was on the ground and water bombers were in the air to handle wildfires. Fires cloud the horizon every spring and summer, and Alberta Forestry's wildfire crews are considered among the best in the world. Despite the unseasonable heat, five separate wildfires ignited around the city that weekend, Fort McMurray's citizens were unconcerned. Shandra Linder was up at dawn on May 3 and saw the brilliance of the sky.

She pulled out her favorite navy-blue suit, medium heels, and left her socks in the drawer. She headed to work in Syncrude's head office at Mildred Lake, where she chose a black Porsche that hadn't seen daylight in six months. Her neighbors were also emerging, unfurling with spring flowers, and garages were opening to the air, sun, and visitors. People were smiling at the bus stop as they remembered the foreign sensation of warm sun on bare skin.

2

Alberta is an energy vortex, with wideopen spaces and a patriotic allegiance to the petroleum industry. It is hardworking and independent-minded, and has a mythic legacy built around cattle, horses, cowboys, and oil. In response to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's program to share Alberta's oil revenue with less-wealthy provinces, a snow sculpture was erected on the campus quad in 1981, depicting Trudeau on his knees, fellating an oil derrick rising from the crotch of Alberta's premier. In an effort to locate every drop, the province has been crisscrossed with exploratory seismic lines, running from horizon to horizon, like meridians on a globe. Fort McMurray is a one-industry town that specializes in bitumen recovery, upgrading, and transport.

Bitumen is a kind of degenerate cousin to crude oil, and the Alberta tar sands are one of the biggest known petroleum reserves in the world. However, it is not oil, but geologists call it bituminous sand. More than 300,000 pipelines serve the fossil fuel industry in Alberta, and the overwhelming bulk of it occurs in a mineral aggregate comparable to an exit ramp. The oil sands deposit in northern Alberta contains 10% bitumen, 5% water and 85% solids, mostly quartzite. The process of excavating, separating, and upgrading this pavement-like substance involves elements of strip mining, rock crushing, and steam cleaning.

To access the bitumen, the overburden must be removed, and electric shovels excavate the bituminous sand in boulder-sized chunks. The Caterpillar T797 hauler is one of the biggest dump trucks in the world, three stories tall and weighs four hundred tons. It takes twelve oversized semi loads traveling with escorts to move the component parts of a single hauler. The most important details in this text are that the hauler trucks in a mine north of Fort McMurray are carrying raw bituminous sand to the crusher, a mechanical black hole composed of two gigantic, continuously turning studded cylinders. The tailings ponds contain more than a quarter of a trillion gallons of contaminated water and effluent from the bitumen upgrading process, and that there is no place for this toxic sludge to go except into the soil, air, or if one of the massive earthen dams should fail.

Fort McMurray, Alberta, is facing extreme temperatures in the -40s and -60s, and summer highs in the 90s. This puts stress on metals, hydraulic hoses, lubricated gears, and any fluid that must be kept flowing at a consistent viscosity. The Alberta government has struggled for a century to come up with a brand for the potential lying just beneath the forest floor, but the prospect of something bordering on the alchemical buried in a magic sandpile was too rich for American capitalists and engineers. By 1930, the US had 100,000 miles of oil pipelines carrying a billion barrels of crude oil annually. In western Canada, Syncrude Sweet Blend is a blend of hydrotreated naphtha, distillate, and gasoil fractions.

Over thousands of millennia, much of this sweet crude was impacted by natural forces that caused it to migrate upward and eastward through the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin. By the time this wayward oil found its way into the McMurray Formation, it had already been discovered by bacteria, which are otherworldly creatures that nourish themselves on hydrocarbons, survive without oxygen, and off-gas methane. The deep biosphere is a vast and teeming biome located between the lifeless depths of Earth's crust and the surface realms of sunlight and oxygen. It is home to trillions of hydrocarbon-eating extremophiles who have taken a devastating toll on the bitumen deposits surrounding Fort McMurray. To make this hydrocarbon residuum usable, it must be artificially restored to its pre-degraded state, which requires two tons of bituminous sand to make a single barrel of bitumen.

To be capable of ignition, liquid bitumen must be preheated well past the boiling