Firefighting Archives - Alberta Views

Wildfire in the Bow Valley

Adrienne Mason — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:00:01 +0000

Across the valley, on the slopes of the Colin Range, Jasper National Park is burning—and my boyfriend is helping to ignite it. Using a torch dripping a flaming mixture of diesel and gasoline, he and his park warden colleagues set a line of fire that’s snaking up the slope.

I’m watching from a pullout down on the Yellowhead Highway. As a young keener with a summer job as a park interpreter, I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire. Visitors are confused, sometimes angry, almost always annoyed that the smoke now swelling up the slope in menacing black plumes threatens to ruin their holiday.

It’s May 1989 and this purpose-lit fire—a carefully planned prescribed burn—is an early effort by Canada’s national parks to bring wildfire back into a landscape where for over a century it’s been largely banished. Fire is as natural as wind and rain across most of Canada’s forests, which have evolved to be recycled and renewed by periodic burns. Trees such as lodgepole pine, for instance, require heat to melt the resin that tightly binds the scales of their cones, releasing the seeds inside.

Since the 1980s, Jasper National Park has been a leader in reintroducing fire and in acknowledging that fires are necessary—and inevitable. It’s a challenging choreography, since what can renew can also destroy. In addition to letting some wildfires safely burn and lighting others purposely to reduce fuels and break up similarly aged stands of densely packed trees, Parks Canada has been actively mitigating wildfire risk around the built environment. They have created fire breaks, thinned and limbed trees, and removed deadfall and woody debris. During my time in Jasper in the late 1980s, for instance, Parks Canada cut trees on the Pyramid Bench behind the townsite, hauling the logs out by horse and snowmobile.

In July 2024, over 35 years after the Colin Range prescribed burn, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I watched—from a distance and through digital screens—as Jasper burned again. On the evening of July 22, in the forest alongside the Jasper–Banff Parkway about 22 kilometres south of town, lightning struck three times in three minutes. Fire hazard was extreme, following a month-long drought and with temperatures reaching 38°C. Within 10 minutes fire had reached the crowns, rendering it virtually unfightable. Gusts of wind as strong as 87 kilometres per hour energized the blazes, and they soon merged into one fire and advanced north up the valley. In the end, the inferno covered about 33,000 hectares—about 40 per cent the size of Calgary—and destroyed 358 structures in the Jasper townsite.

I’m tasked with explaining to people why a national park is purposely lighting its much-beloved forests on fire.

The Jasper wildfire held national and international attention—for a while. Almost two years on, other news floods the airwaves, even as our fire risk persists. In 2025 more than 6,000 wildfires burned across this country, making it Canada’s second-worst wildfire season. (Only 2023, the year before Jasper, was worse.) The threat continues to resonate, however, south of Jasper, in the Bow Valley. If a wildfire could so quickly reach one mountain town, despite decades of preparedness on the ground, could it do the same in Banff?

For Marie-Pierre Rogeau, there’s no question. She is a Banff resident and wildfire research scientist who for over 30 years has studied Alberta’s fire history, including that of Jasper and Banff national parks. “We’ve gone so far without having any fire at all,” she says. “[It] isn’t just a probability; it’s a 100 per cent chance.”

Rogeau’s fire history studies, along with those of Cliff White—a leader in fire management, both regionally and nationally, now retired from Parks Canada—show that until around the 1880s, forests and grasslands in the Bow Valley burned about every 20 to 200 years, depending in part on the elevation. The valley bottom burned regularly. Intervals were longer on cooler, moister slopes.

While lightning did ignite wildfires, this wasn’t as prevalent as is often assumed. A band roughly 20 kilometres wide on the east side of the Continental Divide, including the Bow Valley, is in a “lightning strike shadow.” Instead, human-lit fires were prevalent land-management tools. They were part of the “seasonal rounds” as Indigenous people moved across their territories to hunt and gather, explains White. “[The strategy was] to burn early and burn often,” he says. Regular, low-intensity fires, usually ignited during the spring or fall, were used to herd bison or other wildlife, renew grazing meadows and berry patches, open areas for easier travel, and for dozens of other applications.

The fires created a medley of habitats with different species and ages across the landscape. Natural fires—often igniting during the hotter days of summer—might then burn less intensely, since fuel hadn’t accumulated. Trees with multiple fire scars, for instance, reveal they’d seen many fires but none severe enough to kill them.

Colonization doused the flames. Settlers used fire initially to clear the land, and construction of the national railway sparked the occasional blaze. But once crops were planted, fences were built, homes and businesses became permanent settlements and forests started to be seen as a resource to extract, fire was deemed a menace. With the creation of Banff National Park in 1885, Indigenous cultural fire was banned.

Fire threatened “pristine wilderness.” Fire detection and suppression became a primary duty of the national park warden service, which was established in 1909. The men hired as fire and game wardens rose to the task and fanned out across parks to help protect the forests and “their primeval charms.”

“Culturally, we flipped so fast,” says White. In just a century, after generations of living with wildfire, humans effectively took it away. In a study of wildland fires in Banff National Park, White tracked their decline. In the decade 1880 to 1889, an estimated 37,050 hectares burned; by 1980 to 1989, it was down to zero.

Now, after more than a century of fire suppression—compounded by more droughts and erratic weather thanks to climate change—fire is back with a vengeance.

Instead of burning in a patchwork landscape with varying levels of flammability—grasslands and open meadows, willow fields, stands of leafy green aspen and balsam poplar, clusters of lodgepole pine or Douglas fir—21st-century fires feed off densely packed, fuel-rich forests dominated by 125–175-year-old lodgepole pine primed to burn.

This is what happened in the forest around Jasper. Hot and dry conditions; a continuous source of fuel, including mountain-pine-beetle-killed trees; rapid ignition; and strong convective winds sent the fire into the crowns, where it spread rapidly tree to tree. The fire generated its own weather, including tornado-like winds of nearly 200 kilometres an hour, in places ripping centuries-old Douglas firs out by their roots and levelling the forest, wrenching metal fire grates and bear-proof garbage cans from their concrete pads and even levitating a 3,000-kilogram construction waste bin and tossing it into the Athabasca River. Instead of a mixed-severity fire with the flames moving between the ground and crowns—calming down in places, flaring up in others, burning with varying intensities throughout—fires like Jasper’s level the forest, replacing entire stands, in places incinerating the soil and exposing bedrock.

Today, we’re in a worst-case scenario, says White. After removing human-caused fires, “Now we’re walking into climate change.”

“Fire has a way,” says Rogeau. “It’s like a wick. It will find whatever path… can burn.” The challenge for communities built in the middle of fire-shaped landscapes—such as the Bow Valley towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore—is to employ strategies that trim the wicks and reduce the pathways.

But how do you fireproof a valley?

For one, you can fight fire with fire. About 75 years after the creation of the Park Warden Service, which had so effectively removed fire from wildlands, it was also park wardens who started bringing fire back. Cliff White helped write Banff National Park’s fire management plan and was on the ground at the park’s first prescribed burn, three hectares in size, near Two Jack Canal in 1983. Since then, the park has burned about 31,000 hectares.

One of the largest burns was in the Fairholme Range in 2003. It was a gutsy move. The prescribed fire was on the eastern edge of the national park, near the highway and between Banff and Canmore. Ecologically, the fire aimed to restore the historic landscape by reducing dense lodgepole pine growth and expanding meadows, and to get ahead of a beetle infestation. It also provided protection for Harvie Heights, a small cluster of homes on the park boundary. The project took years to plan and included an extensive fuel break about 500 hectares in size—larger than the Banff townsite. Within the burn, the forest was thinned and grasses and understory—including highly volatile juniper—were burned off.

The Fairholme Fire was a success. For White, it stands as a great example of how agencies and communities can work together to both restore fire-dependent ecosystems and protect communities.

But 23 years later, there’s still so much work to be done. As we walk the fuel break in October 2025—now a field of dry, golden grass and post-fire regrowth of shoulder-high lodgepole pines studded with large old-growth Douglas firs that were protected—White explains that prescribed fires aren’t just “one and done.” Follow-up burns remove the charred wood and dense stands of pine that regenerate in the fire’s wake. “The first [fire] is interesting,” he says. “But it’s the second one that’s really something.” Burning sooner, and with some regularity, maintains a break’s functionality. The longer you wait, the more challenging the job, says White. “If you wait 30 or 40 years, it will be huge.”

Parks Canada has had a reburn of Fairholme on the books as a priority for years, but, to date, it hasn’t occurred. The agency’s communications team says only that “the project is currently under expansive planning and will proceed once conditions are met.”

Despite the success of the initial Fairholme fire and a management plan that supports burning, prescribed fires haven’t been used extensively in the front country of the national park in recent years. A small area was burned near the Banff airport in 2022 and another nearer to town in 2023—controversially so, as it escaped containment—but other than that, there hasn’t been a prescribed fire in the Bow Valley since 2014.

With prescribed fire seemingly on the back burner, another tool has rolled into the valley to help reduce fuel and “cool” the landscape, one that not long ago would have seemed incongruent with the philosophy of parks: logging equipment.

Above the Lake Louise village, Parks Canada is constructing a community fire guard. Averaging 400 to 500 metres wide, the guard stretches from behind the Chateau Lake Louise down to the village and across the highway to the parking lot of Lake Louise ski hill. The lake on one side of the valley and the tree-free alpine of Whitehorn Mountain on the other anchor the guard with two fire-resistant landscape features.

In the upper section of the guard, completed in the winter of 2024–25, a lone tree stands in a snow-covered clearcut. Left as a bird perch and habitat for cavity nesters, the snag is a sign that logging—or mechanical tree removal, as the agency prefers to call it—within a national park comes with a particular set of rules.

Shelley Tamelin, the wildfire risk reduction project manager for Lake Louise as well as for Yoho and Kootenay national parks, explains the strict parameters for the company contracted to do the work—everything from leaving wildlife trees and buffers around wetlands to working only when the ground is frozen. Roads are carefully planned, constructed and mitigated, and contractors are required to place spill trays under equipment that’s not in use, to catch fuel or oil drips.

Despite their name, fuel breaks or fire guards can’t be counted on to suddenly stop a fire. “The guard gives our operations folks a place to work,” says Tamelin. This can mean laying down sprinkler lines to wet the forest or assets such as critical infrastructure, or lighting a fire in the direction of the approaching fire, consuming the fuel in the process.

The Lake Louise Community Fire Guard is just one of several along the Bow Valley within the confines of Banff National Park. In addition to the guards already built, “risk-reduction projects” involving forest thinning and log hauling were completed over the winter of 2025–26 on Tunnel Mountain and the Spray Valley–Middle Springs area near the Banff townsite as well as in multiple smaller sites within a 15-kilometre radius of the townsite.

Jasper’s wildfire held national and international attention for a while. Now other news floods the airwaves.

Farther down the valley, the Town of Canmore, Municipal District of Bighorn and the Kananaskis Improvement District are building the Bow Valley Community Fireguard. Construction started in winter 2024, with support through the Forest Resource Improvement Association of Alberta Community Fire Guard Program. When completed, the guard will surround Canmore, the Canmore Nordic Centre Provincial Park and the communities within the Municipal District of Bighorn, including Harvie Heights and Deadman’s Flats. The program has had full co-operation from the province to allow logging within provincial parks.

Despite the idea of logging in parks being anathema, White suggests we might need to do even more of it to protect the Bow Valley and the towns and infrastructure within it. He proposes the creation of a not-for-profit society to oversee the ongoing work of maintaining fuel breaks and fuel-reduction programs just beyond community boundaries under the guidance of professional foresters and in concert with community fire departments. Income generated from log sales would go back into the program to maintain it over the long term. In time, he says, these areas could be maintained through periodic burning. Carefully done, this could serve as a prototype for how to both live with wildfire and protect communities from it.

Ultimately, though, efforts to mitigate and hopefully minimize the impact of wildfire on towns like Banff and Canmore lie within those communities themselves. Wildfire will come; there’s no doubt. Fire guards may or may not help slow fires’ approach. And while “fear is a good starter, [it’s] a poor finisher,” White said in a recent presentation. The key for people is to put their fear into action.

The Jasper townsite didn’t burn because a wall of flames surged into town. It ignited after an aerial ember attack. Flaming branches, burning pinecones, moss, bark and other firebrands rained down like an assault of arrows. Wooden rooftops were the first to ignite, then decks, debris-filled eaves, bark mulch, fences, trees. Soon multiple buildings were aflame and the fire was spreading from structure to structure.

Ember showers are one of the most frightening aspects of wildfires. Fuelled by strong winds—fire weather generated by the blaze itself—embers can leap ahead by as much as 17 kilometres. They’re the reason an otherwise natural wildland fire can morph into a disaster. We wouldn’t be talking about the 2024 Jasper fire today if embers hadn’t ignited the town.

In Banff ember showers could come from any direction, but Sulphur Mountain is a commonly cited vector. White often refers to the mountain on the south side of town as “Banff’s volcano.” If fire coming from the Spray Valley breaches Sulphur Mountain, it could volley embers onto the community below.

The threat of ember showers in communities on the edge of wildlands is the impetus behind the FireSmart program. The national initiative gives dozens of actionable steps to reduce the wildfire risk to homes and properties.

Wildfire will come to Banff; there’s no doubt. The key will be for people to put their fear into action before it’s too late.

Chris Worobets has lived at the base of Sulphur Mountain for almost 30 years; the threat of wildfire is quite literally in his backyard. For several years he’s been helping to reduce the wildfire risks in Valleyview, the townhouse development in Banff where he lives. He’s clear-eyed about his chosen home. “We [built] in a forest,” he says. “This isn’t an urban centre.” As such, he sees homeowners as critical partners in fire prevention.

Worobets chairs the FireSmart committee at Valleyview and has been helping with mitigation since 2006, when the townhouse replaced its highly flammable cedar shingle roof. Volunteers have since moved combustible items away from structures, removed and limbed trees, planted low-risk deciduous trees, purchased sprinklers, held work bees to remove debris such as cones and needles and are working on making all decks and outbuildings built to FireSmart standards. It’s a slow process, though, even for a neighbourhood that’s largely onboard with the idea.

The Town of Banff is a booster for the FireSmart program and is implementing the program’s protocols, including tree removal, on municipal property. The town’s full-time FireSmart coordinator, Chris Pottie, provides free FireSmart assessments to homeowners—conducting over 150 in 2025—after which residents can apply to the town for discounted rooftop sprinklers, $1,200 roof-replacement rebates and financial support for coniferous tree removal. Pottie says there was a definite uptick in interest in the FireSmart program after Jasper townsite burned, and in 2025 the rebates were fully utilized.

While this is something, on the ground it means 120 sprinklers installed, 15 roofs replaced and 173 trees removed. Some private citizens do their own hazard reduction work even without the rebates, including Rogeau, who replaced her deck and removed trees. But for a town with almost 3,000 residences, it’s a long way from being well protected from flaming embers.

Effectively fireproofing a community requires widespread buy-in from residents, something that can be a hard sell in places famed for their natural beauty. And it’s frustrating to spend time, money and effort fireproofing your property if your neighbour does nothing. To date, the “stick” used by municipalities like Banff is more like a pool noodle—focusing on education and nudging people into doing the right thing.

The approach is toughening, though. Any new construction in Canmore and Banff is subject to building and landscaping requirements that mitigate risk from wildfires, including use of Class A roofing materials, which have the highest fire resistance. And Banff revised its community standards bylaw to mandate the removal of fire hazards such as dead trees, long grass, bark mulch and other combustibles within 10 metres of structures. In the end, insurance companies may provide the incentive that inspires action. Claims from wildfires are increasing, insurance premiums are rising, and money talks. Co-operators, for instance, offers a discount in Canada for FireSmart-certified properties.

Even though the loudest narrative coming out of the 2024 Jasper fire is that one-third of the community burned, it’s important to emphasize that two-thirds of it didn’t, including the critical infrastructure such as wastewater treatment needed for the town to function and rebuild. An extensive Natural Resources Canada report detailing the event acknowledged that more than 20 years of hazard-reduction treatment by Parks Canada around the townsite had moderated fire behaviour. It specifically noted that the town had made more fuel mitigation efforts than any other Canadian community under threat of wildland fire. (Although the report specifically mentions Parks Canada, FireSmart measures have been ongoing for over two decades.) These treatments helped reduce fire intensity in parts of town, knocking it out of the crowns and onto the ground, where it was easier to fight, ultimately reducing the spread of embers and saving structures.

The resounding message to be learned in Banff from understanding the history and role of fire on the landscape, and from the analysis that has come out of Jasper, is that the world of today isn’t the world of a century ago—or even 20 years ago. Wildfire suppression has only made our forests more combustible. Now, with the climate warming and becoming less predictable, fire seasons are longer and fires are more intense and harder to control. The risk to Banff is urgent.

Fire historian Stephen Pyne has coined a term for our era: the Pyrocene. “We’ve made an alliance with fire,” he writes. “It took us to the top of the food chain and now threatens to unhinge the planet.”

Adrienne Mason is a former Jasper National Park interpreter and now a full-time science writer and editor living in Tofino.

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“More Extreme Fires”

Graham Thomson — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 08:00:58 +0000

Everybody has a Jasper story. In the aftermath of the July wildfire that ripped through Jasper National Park and the Jasper townsite, people from around the world shared theirs.

My own story includes countless summer days camping/hotelling and winter days skiing. In fact, I was in Jasper paddling my feet in Jasper Lake alongside hundreds of others the day before the town was evacuated. We had no inkling of the disaster to come. Officials believed the main fire erupted from lightning strikes the following day, and, in the words of Jasper mayor Richard Ireland, moved with such speed and ferocity it “humbled the humans on the ground” trying to stop the flames.

The only thing that moved as fast was the finger pointing in the days after. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees said the provincial government had “refused to heed warnings from front-line wildland firefighting staff and bears responsibility for the disaster.” The right-wing sovereigntist group Free Alberta Strategy blamed federal environment minister Steven Guilbeault, saying that “while Ottawa fixates on climate change rhetoric, their neglect of forest fire prevention has left Alberta’s landscapes vulnerable to devastation.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was later determined to be earth’s hottest day on record.

Premier Danielle Smith, ever one to attack the federal government, suggested that jurisdictional barriers impeded the province’s ability to help fight the fire on federal lands. “We can’t just send equipment into federal airspace without coordination,” said Smith, who asked for a unified wildfire command with the federal government.

That’s a great idea. It won’t stop future megafires. It will make fighting them more coordinated. But, according to experts and both the Alberta and federal governments, the Jasper fire was so ferocious and fast, with a wall of flame 100 metres high and generating its own weather system of lightning strikes, no amount of coordination could have stopped it.

Critics blamed Parks Canada for not doing enough over the years to clear out swaths of deadwood created by pine beetles (with the scope of their infestation itself a result of a warming climate). While deadwood creates its own fire hazard, it’s something of a red herring when it comes to the Jasper fire, according to wildfire expert Mike Flannigan with Thompson Rivers University. He pointed out the pine-beetle deadwood had been on the ground for years, and this material “supports intense surface fire but generally doesn’t support crown fires.”

The Jasper fire was a crown fire, where flames race through the treetops and fire-fuelled winds expel burning embers several kilometres ahead, easily crossing fire breaks. It’s the kind of fire that hit Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016. “We can’t stop these fires,” said Flannigan, who has been warning us for years about impending wildfires. But even he was shocked by the immensity of Alberta’s 2023 wildfire season, which saw 2.2 million hectares burn, 10 times the yearly average.

Flannigan said better coordination between various levels of government is key to fighting fires, and that we’ll learn valuable lessons from the Jasper one. But in the end the main culprit is something of a taboo topic for the Alberta government.

“We are seeing more disasters because of climate change,” said Flannigan. “We’re seeing more extreme fires.”

Premier Smith, a loud and proud booster of the fossil fuels that are driving global warming, avoids even acknowledging climate change, preferring to spuriously blame our devastating wildfires on arson, careless humans, El Niño and, generically, Mother Nature.

Another scientific canary in the climate change coal mine is Andreas Hamann, a professor in the University of Alberta’s department of renewable resources, who studies how a warming planet affects forests. He says well-meaning plans such as the federal government’s commitment to plant two billion trees over 10 years to renew devastated forests are “pointless, unless species and planting stock are selected to survive anticipated climate conditions for the next 50–100 years. Otherwise they will get decimated by pests and diseases and go up in flames if climate change is not carefully accounted for.”

The day Jasper’s monster fire was born, July 22, 2024, was coincidentally later determined by NASA to be earth’s hottest on record.

But dealing with climate change is a tough sell politically in Alberta and Canada, and mitigation efforts are an easy target to attack for pro-fossil-fuel ideologues. In fact “climate change” has become a trigger phrase for deniers, who lump it in with what they dismiss as leftist “woke” language and who dismiss scientists as “alarmists.”

Climate change has become another weapon in our culture wars. The victims are countless millions of people around the world devastated by a changing climate. They include the residents of Slave Lake and Fort McMurray and, in the summer of 2024, the people of Jasper.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Alberta Is Burning

Trina Moyles — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:00:27 +0000

Amy Cardinal Christianson grew up in northern Alberta on Treaty 8 with what she calls “good fire,” or “the kind you can walk beside”—low-intensity fires set when the conditions are cool and damp. Cultural fire, used by Indigenous peoples for centuries as a tool for promoting berry growth and habitat for moose and deer, has long been part of her story.

As someone who spent her childhood in the forest, “I experienced wildfires,” says Cardinal Christianson, who is a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta and now works as an Indigenous fire specialist with Parks Canada. “But I never remember what we’re seeing today.”

Last May when wildfires sparked and raged out of control across Alberta, prompting numerous evacuations, Cardinal Christianson found herself on deployment to the Paskwa base near Fox Lake as an Indigenous liaison on a provincial incident command team. Fox Lake is one of three communities on Little Red River Cree Nation, just over an hour’s drive east of High Level. The Paskwa Fire, which was first detected on May 2, prompted the community’s evacuation on May 3.

“The fire completely destroyed the community,” says Crystal McAteer, mayor of High Level, to which many of Fox Lake’s 3,700-residents fled. Out-of-control wildfires on the opposite side of High Level likewise threatened the communities of Chateh and Rainbow Lake, resulting in even more people ordered to evacuate to High Level.

More than 100 homes and 200 structures in Fox Lake were burned by the Paskwa Fire. The land that people depend on for survival, including hunting and gathering, was blackened.

For Indigenous communities, which are disproportionately impacted by wildfire, comprising 42 per cent of evacuation events in Canada, the losses are catastrophic. Even if your house is still standing, “you’ve lost everything that connects you to the landscape,” says Cardinal Christianson. “It can take generations for those forests to grow back.”

The 2023 wildfire season prompted the evacuation of 48 communities and 38,000 people in Alberta. Several communities were evacuated more than once. Choking smoke spread across the province, leading to numerous air-quality warnings and to Edmonton activating its first-ever “extreme weather” response. A record-breaking 2,214,958 hectares burned and several communities were destroyed, including East Prairie Metis Settlement, northwest of Edmonton, which lost 40 homes to a fire on May 5.

But experts have long been anticipating a season like this one. The situation in Alberta last May was “like a freight train coming,” says Mike Flannigan, whose research on wildfire ecology spans 40 years. “The weather forecasters were saying, ‘Look out, a classic situation is coming, batten down the hatches.’ ”

The most destructive and costly wildfires in Alberta’s recent history have ignited and spread in early May, including fires that devastated Slave Lake in 2011 and Fort McMurray in 2016, and threatened High Level in 2019. The risk for wildfires during the “spring window,” a period after the snow melts and before green-up when there’s a lot of dead organic material, occurs well across Canada, but Alberta is the busiest province come May, says Flannigan.

“There’s more people working and recreating in the forest during this time,” he says. “The weather conditions—hot, dry and windy—are very conducive to fire spread.”

What did shock Flannigan in 2023 was the way extreme fire weather persisted through the length of the summer into fall. Blocking ridges—atmospheric patterns that occur when centres of high pressure or low pressure set up over a region and prevent other weather systems from moving through—occurred over large expanses of the country. Hot, dry weather catalyzed fire spread.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh it’s our forest management practices or land-use practices that are causing the change in our fire activity,” says Flannigan. “Sorry, but those are really bit players. It’s climate change, climate change, climate change.”

On September 23 the Basset Fire, southwest of High Level—which had ignited in early June—was reawakened by extreme winds. It exploded out of control and destroyed the power supply to Chateh, Rainbow Lake and Zama City. The Dene Tha’ First Nation issued an evacuation order for Chateh, and with the main highway cut off, residents travelled for six hours on a bush road to reach safety. “They arrived at five o’clock in the morning and were just beat,” says McAteer. “This had been their third time [being evacuated] to High Level in a year.”

The Basset Fire’s excursion (when a fire jumps beyond a contained perimeter) on September 23 contributed to a record-breaking day in Canada, says Flannigan, with more area scorched—700,000 hectares—than on any other day in modern record.

Across the country, 18.5 million hectares burned during the 2023 season, obliterating the previous record of seven million in 1995. But according to Flannigan, what’s most eye opening is the impact, including the loss of structures, wildlife and firefighters’ lives, the effects of smoke inhalation, and the evacuation of more than 200,000 Canadians.

What’s certain, he says, is that the wildfire situation here is only going to get worse. “It’s only going to get crazier. Expect more fire and smoke in our future. Expect more community impacts. These fires will continue, and maybe increase in frequency and intensity.”

The uncertainty remains: What are we going to do about it?

Carrol Johnston stands where her house used to be before it burned in a wildfire, May 5, in East Prairie Métis Settlement

In 2021 Alberta cut 247 positions, 57 in wildfire management. “We started 2023 with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta Wildfire entered the 2023 fire season short-staffed, says Mike Dempsey, vice-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE). This was because of provincial government cuts to permanent and seasonal staff positions. “In 2021 Agriculture and Forestry cut 247 positions, and 57 of those were in wildfire management,” says Dempsey. “We started this season with a big deficit of people power.”

Alberta’s legislated fire season starts March 1 and ends October 31. Despite this, in 2022 the provincial government shortened seasonal contracts of wildland firefighters—including radio dispatchers, lookout observers, camp bosses and those who work in logistical roles—by three to four weeks. This meant, says Dempsey, that many firefighting members were still in training when the 2023 wildfires broke out.

Alberta Wildfire is also facing serious retention issues with firefighters, many of whom have left the agency to pursue firefighting careers with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, which offers extended hiring seasons and healthcare benefits. The firefighting “brain drain” to other provinces or wildfire agencies has caused seasonal staff to shrink by 30 per cent, says Dempsey. “The pool for this kind of knowledge on the front line of a wildfire is small,” he says. “There’s competition across the country for high-quality firefighters. You can’t just hire people off the street to go into these extreme fire situations.”

After leaving itself short-handed, the Alberta government resorted to importing 4,000 firefighters from other provinces and countries, including the US, Mexico and Australia. In early May, with 88 wildfires burning across the province, Alberta called in the Canadian military—although, says Dempsey, the premier delayed five days before requesting support from the federal government.

Mayor McAteer, who remembers how the Chuckegg Creek Fire came dangerously close to High Level in 2019, says she saw the impacts of government cuts on wildfire response in 2023. “By the end of August the pay periods for seasonal firefighters were done,” she says. “They broke apart the camp and took the [water] bombers and helicopters, even though a wildfire was coming at us.”

In mid-September, when the Bassett Fire exploded, McAteer says she had to phone the Minister of Forestry and Parks, Todd Loewen, to request resources. “Our communities are in danger,” she told him.

When major wildfires threaten communities in Alberta, the government deploys an “incident command team” made up of highly trained and experienced permanent staff to manage wildfires. Previously the province had four of these teams. In 2023 they were cut down to two. This meant permanent staff were working double time, upwards of seven deployments. Says Dempsey: “Fatigue and burnout start to happen.”

The Alberta government needs to invest more in its wildfire management program to recruit and retain firefighters. “You can’t do more with less, so we need to spend more money on this,” Flannigan says. He argues spending now will save more money later, not just from having to constantly recruit and train firefighters but from having to import firefighters from across the world and pay staff overtime.

This doesn’t necessarily mean putting money into aircraft or sustained action efforts. According to Flannigan, we simply need “boots on the ground to put the fire out.” “You can kill any wildfire small,” he says. “We need extra resources in initial attack.”

He points to the public misconception that aircraft dropping loads of clay retardant is an effective means of extinguishing a wildfire. “If the fire is really small, it may be helping,” he says. “But if a wildfire is large, it’s like spitting on a campfire.”

A fire near Drayton Valley, May 10

The most significant cause of big wildfires is lightning. Of the 2,211,900 hectares that burned in Alberta in 2023, 1,750,867 burned because of lightning. Still, the number of human-caused wildfires is a concern. In 2023 the province responded to 659 human-caused wildfires. (The cause of 48 fires remains under investigation.) “We can do better,” says Flannigan. “People-caused fires are preventable.” The province needs to implement fire bans and forest closures before critical burning days, he says, particularly in early May after the snow melts but before the forest leafs out, or when periods of extreme fire weather—heat and drought—are forecasted. “Forest closures are very unpopular with the public and industry,” Flannigan adds, “but extremely effective at preventing wildfires.”

These closures are exactly what they sound like: halting industrial activity such as logging or oil extraction and prohibiting recreational activities such as hiking, camping or driving ATVs. The province of Nova Scotia implemented a forest closure last May after its wildfire situation escalated and had consumed 200 homes.

The wildfire scientist is also urging the government of Alberta to implement mandatory “fire smarting” around homes. Fire-smarting refers to vegetation management to reduce the fuels that can easily catch flame. Fire is “opportunistic,” says Flannigan. It’s always looking for a place to burn and spread. Out-of-control wildfires can cast burning embers—bits of needles and twigs—and ignite additional “spot fires.” In 2011, spot fires were starting in Slave Lake despite the wildfire front being more than two kilometres from town.

“When the rain of burning embers hits a home that didn’t ‘fire smart,’ it catches fire and spreads structure to structure,” Flannigan says. “It’s like a breach in a dam. Once it goes, it’s gone.” He advocates that people in Alberta’s fire-prone communities be required to remove flammable fuels within 1.5 m of their homes. California—another jurisdiction all too familiar with wildfire—already requires the removal of flammable material within five feet, or the equivalent of 1.5 m.

But this isn’t all that’s needed, argues Werner Kurz, a senior research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service of Natural Resources Canada. He says Alberta and other provinces need to readdress their forest management practices to prevent fires.

For decades, Alberta has predominantly managed the boreal forest for timber production, harvesting and replanting plots with coniferous species only, including pine and spruce. These trees are highly flammable and contribute to the rapid spread of fires, says Kurz, whereas broadleaf species such as aspen typically slow down or stop the flames: “Aspen, birch and maple, any of the trees that have leaves rather than needles, hold a lot of moisture.”

The forestry industry, however, has historically suppressed the growth of aspens through broad application of herbicides or through mechanical clearing (cutting down saplings). Kurz says provinces must take a design approach and determine “ignition points” on the landscape—places where fires tend to start, due to people or lightning—and plant tree species accordingly. “It wouldn’t be a checkerboard,” says Kurz. “It would be a design where we could, say, have a strip of broadleaf species that would reduce the fire risk and become a natural firebreak.”

Alberta needs to readdress the spatial arrangement of our forests and encourage more open forest, with conifers interspersed with broadleaf species. Says Kurz: “It’s about making it more difficult for fires to spread from one fuel to the next.”

It’s far less costly to prevent forest fires than to extinguish them.

As climate change creates more wildfires, more smoke and more community evacuations, our communities need to be ready and our government needs to provide them support. “Every community should have an emergency management plan that focuses on prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery,” says Flannigan. It’s far less costly to invest in preventing wildfires from exploding out of control than it is to extinguish them or rebuild infrastructure afterwards, he says, with “every dollar spent saving us $5 to $15 down the road.”

One of the most critical aspects of preparedness, says Flannigan, is being able to efficiently and safely evacuate people from their homes and communities. People need to consider escape routes, including roads in and out of neighbourhoods or communities, and green spaces, including golf courses and football fields that can serve as fire breaks.

He references a situation that occurred in Kamloops, BC, in 2021 when a wildfire threatened a neighbourhood with hundreds of homes but only one access road. “It was a complete bottleneck—a disaster waiting to happen,” he says. “Fortunately, a rainstorm came along. They were exceedingly lucky. It could have been much worse.”

In July 2023 Ron Bellerose, chair of the East Prairie Metis Settlement, spoke out about the community’s decade-long struggles to obtain provincial support to build a second road out of the community. “There’s only one escape route in East Prairie, and that’s the scary part,” he told CBC News.

When wildfires enter a community, one of the first things to be impacted is power, followed by water pressure. In addition to escape routes, residents could benefit from an investment in wildfire evacuation centres, says Flannigan, where people can seek safe refuge while accessing essential services. High Level is proposing to build such a centre with the capacity to house upwards of 2,000 people. Mayor McAteer says the town signed a friendship agreement with the Dene Tha’ First Nation to move forward with the idea, which was generated following the Chuckegg Creek wildfire in 2019.

“We recognize that more and more people are coming here,” says McAteer. “It’s easier to have people in one facility, where they can get the same information and they’re looked after.” The centre would provide food, water and medical and interpretive services to evacuees, many from nearby Indigenous communities.

And while High Level serves a regional population of 30,000, it also provides services to communities in the Northwest Territories. “NWT evacuees came through town this past summer,” says McAteer, referring to the wildfires that evacuated multiple communities, including the city of Yellowknife. “Many of them travelled for 17 hours through wildfires. They were so traumatized.”

Some of the NWT evacuees stayed in High Level and slept in the town’s arena. Others camped out in local farmers’ fields and pastures. The town and the Dene Tha’ First Nation are lobbying for provincial and federal support to build the centre, says McAteer, although it’s been a struggle to rally the funds—upwards of $40-million. But McAteer points out that over the long term it’s cheaper to build an evacuation centre to house people locally than to pay for food and housing for evacuees in larger cities, including Peace River, Grande Prairie and Edmonton. “We can do it right here for less,” she says.

Edmonton, May 20; the city issued numerous air-quality warnings in 2023

In light of the disproportionate impact of wildfire on First Nations communities in the province, Amy Cardinal Christianson wants to see more Indigenous people involved in higher-level decision making. She’s advocating for a fire guardian program, which would employ Indigenous peoples on their traditional territories, year-round, monitoring and responding to wildfire in culturally relevant ways.

She says the legacy of wildfire suppression in Alberta has contributed to the crisis we’re seeing today. By attempting to extinguish all fire on the landscape, we’ve in turn created highly flammable stands of forest. Combined with the effects of climate change, fires explode into infernos.

“For me, the answer isn’t only investing in larger firefighting forces, because [suppression] perpetuates the problem we’re already seeing from the colonial regulation of fire,” Cardinal Christianson says. “A Fire Guardian movement is about building a better relationship with fire. Having fire on the ground when it’s safer, and doing mitigation work around communities and by communities that directly benefit from it.”

Cardinal Christianson wants people to understand that her fires are not the same as prescribed burns. The practice depends on close observation of the land and weather, as opposed to Western concepts such as the Fire Weather Index, used by agencies across Canada. “An elder once told me that he knew when it was time to burn based on the plumpness of spruce needles,” says Cardinal Christianson. “Now Western scientists have a term for that; they call it the ‘foliar moisture content.’ ”

She’s advocating for year-round investment to support Indigenous-led fire stewardship in Alberta. “When there’s an extreme fire event, the floodgates open in terms of funding. It’s unlimited how much money you can throw at a fire,” says Cardinal Christianson. “But there’s never the kind of funding during the off-season for communities to mitigate fire risk or to carry out fire practices.”

She points to the success of Indigenous Fire Guardian programs in other countries, including Australia and the US, which are seeing the positive results of supporting communities year-round to monitor and mitigate for wildfires on their traditional lands.

Cardinal Christianson and her colleagues are trying to educate people about the importance of Indigenous-led cultural burning on the landscape, a technology that was never lost, despite the fact that it was banned in the early 1900s in Alberta.

This past fall when the conditions were cool and damp, she and her family implemented a small burn on her property in northern Alberta. “My kids were playing in a leaf pile right next to where we were putting fire on the ground,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be a scary thing—fire can be good.”

Trina Moyles’s Lookout: Love, Solitude and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest (Penguin, 2021) is about
her time working at a fire tower in northern Alberta.

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