Will I love Fire Weather?

On the surface, this is the story of a horrific wildfire that torched most of Ft. McMurray, a small city in the boreal forest of northern Alberta. The city exists because the dominant industry is the extraction of bitumen that can be turned into synthetic crude oil and other petroleum based products. The fire was so intense that it created its own weather system of destructive winds and lightning storms.

Vaillant does a masterful job of telling the story of how firefighters along with the residents and local authorities of Ft. McMurray coped with the fire emergency. The fire itself… show more.

I enjoyed the drama and detail associated with the wildfire conflagration that burned into Fort McMurray all nested within the dissonance between climate-change-driven wildfires and climate-change-driving fossil fuel extraction.

Aspects of this fire can undoubtedly be called a natural disaster, a land management failure, a suppression-mentality failure, a social trauma, and a catastrophic event to many people in the area; being more recent than 1910, however, we don’t know yet the full extent of its impacts on regional, national and global policy. However, the setting and direct dissonance over “what is a fuel for what” is unique and provides new… show more.

Did I truly want to read a 400-page book about a raging wildfire that caused $10-billion in damage and burned 2,579 homes to ash? Within a few pages, my answer was “Hell, yes!”

Centered on a record-setting disaster in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Fire Weather is as gripping as a Hollywood blockbuster and as magnetic as a Martin Luther King Jr. speech.

John Vaillant captures the shock and heartbreak of destruction—but also the cognitive dissonance that allows our species to burn enough fossil fuels to threaten our very existence. Cities like Fort McMurray wouldn’t exist without the oil industry. But nor… show more.

Living in California taught me how wildfires can cause widespread destruction. But it took Vaillant’s Fire Weather to show me how climate-worsened wildfires can unravel the world as we know it. 

The book reads like a thriller. It recounts the catastrophic wildfire that obliterated Fort McMurray in 2016 in Canada. That fire generated its own weather systems, caused billions in losses, and forced tens of thousands of people to flee.

Valiant shows how fire is the very element that makes modern society possible, but it also has the power to destroy it. The book provides a cautionary tale of what… show more.

On May 3, 2016, the entire population of Fort MacMurray, Alberta—an oil town of 90,000—was evacuated as a wildfire dubbed “the Beast” jumped the river, rolled through town, and laid waste to pretty much every stick of those people’s built lives, leaving incalculable grief and a dark cloak of portent over the 21st century.

Valliant’s read-it-through-your-fingers account of the fire itself, plus his dissection of the devil’s deals we’ve made with the petrochemical industry, make this book an instant classic. It’ll be talked about in 100 years. (If, that is, people are still around to talk about it.)

Okay, that’s… show more.