Is there a way we can prevent them from occurring in the first place, or is it inevitable during the summer months?
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Wildfires are a common natural occurrence. Their causes can vary. Frequently the cause is lightning strikes a dry patch of ground with dense dead fallen branches or leaves. With the right wind and temperature conditions the flames can spread far and wide. However, occasionally fires are caused by reckless people. Either way once it grows enough the fire takes on something of a life of its own.
The rising heat from the fire will draw air in and up and create enough wind to feed itself. On average a wildfire spreads at a rate just over 14mph. That’s faster than most people can run, and the flames are going in every direction. With the wind they go even faster. This makes them hard to get out in front of. Even worse is the disturbance they create in the local weather also makes them hard to fully predict where they’ll go. So getting out ahead of it is tough. Not to mention there aren’t enough Wildland fire fighter and tanker aircraft to fully contain the truly massive fires. To say nothing of getting them to the most remote fires.
In the end you have to prioritize. 1) prevent the fire from spreading towards people 2) stop the fire from spreading towards valuable things 3) stop the fire from destroying more forest.
You’ll note saving the forest is last. Most forests actually evolved to cope with and even thrive off of wildfires. So a wildfire in an isolated part of a forest can be a good thing for the ecology. In fact, it’s the policy of fighting all fires aggressively that van put us in a predicament. Without an occasional fire to burn away small brush and deadfall the potential for massive forest consuming blazes grows. Therefore the best way to prevent forest fires is to light a forest fire and control its spread.
Wildfires are pretty much inevitable; the real problem is *human-caused* wildfires.
The only way to prevent those is through PR campaigns, park regulations and fire bans. And even then, people don’t always listen.
What you can do to prevent a lot of the damage is to be mindful of burning regulations; put the fire out *completely* (the ashes should be cold to the touch) before you leave your campsite; and just…don’t smoke in a forest.
Sadly, a large portion of human-caused wildfires occur when idiots toss their cigarette butts in the grass.
Lots of other good comments here, but to make this even more granular, a fire needs 3 things to burn (the fire triangle for anyone who has done S-130/1).
1. Oxygen
2. Heat
3. Fuel
Depending on the type of fire you attack it in different ways, but you’re always trying to take one of these away. With a grease fire you smother it to take away the oxygen. In a house fire you douse it with a lot of water to dissipate the heat.
With a forest fire, there is no way you’re ever going to remove oxygen or have enough water to cool the fire , so you’re left with pulling fuel away from the fire to shape it and contain it. Yes, you do use water, but you’re using it to control the fire more than douse it. Taking away the fuel takes a lot of time and manpower, especially once fires get big. Many big fires out West are controlled and only ever extinguish when winter snows/rains hit.
The vast majority of forest fires are caused by lightning. Sometimes by human stupidity, but lightning is by far from the most common.
The big reason they’re difficult to stop is that fire feeds itself. The hotter it gets, the more things dry out, and the more readily things want to burn. On top of that, once they get significantly large, the amount of water needed to put those flames out would ruin the terrain more than any fire could.
There’s no real way of preventing them. Often times, the best option to put them out is to just try to limit where they can spread. We often do this by felling trees surrounding the fire; effectively creating a barrier the fire can’t get across. (fire can’t spread with nothing to burn)
And even if we could prevent all fires, we actually would be harming nature in doing so. As said above, most forest fires are natural (ignoring global warming). Many trees like Jack and Lodgepole pines actually need the heat of forest fires for their seeds to spread.
In Alberta where there where horrifying wildfires this year it was caused by grass stubble that is when the farmers harvest the last canola/sorgum/grass/wheat they leave an inch or 2 of the stalk still in the ground. This allows this root system to remain during the winter. Alberts winters are very cold. See -40 degrees both units of measurement work. If you till the land pre winter you end up in a situation like the great depression where all the top soil erodes away and the soil quality decays rapidly. So the farmers leave the grass stubble because its good farming.
This year was a drought year for Alberta they are actually quite rare. Seasons up in western Canada are a little delayed compared to the south. Basically April showers are snow and may flowers are rain etc. Were a month behind probanly becsuse we do not want to follow Ottowas shitty example. My little joke. So this grass stubble is no problemo if may is very wet because the grass starts to grow and the new green shoots will not burn in most normal years these little grasslings are a fire break. In a drought year this grass stubble is basically gasoline awaiting a flame.
Now if you arent from Alberta there are a few things you need to know about Alberta. First its fucking huge, like you can fit whole europien nations inside with room to spair. Second outside its large cities Alberts is 95-98% cultivated farmlands. Southern Alberta anyway. I think wood buffalo national park is the biggest area thats not farm land, that and the rockey mountians. But The VAST majority of Alberta is cultivated farm land and ranches. Aka miles and fucking miles of grass stubble with basically nothing in the way to make a fire break. Any ignition source starts a chain reaction and generates enough snoke to be a problem for as far as California because if you remember the first thing Alberta is fucking huge.
Sadly it is almost impossible to fight this type of fire because there are no real natural barriers. Becsuse rural Alberta is so sparcely populated it is also politically a waste of resources as fucking over farmers wont make them change the way they vote since you know the big C has been fucking over farmers in Alberta for 100 years and they still vote exclusivly for them.
The other reason they are hard to fight is because the area they take up is massive and they are rare. Even the most dedicated lefty in Alberta would have a hard time staffing an emergency fire response unit to be effective because it would cost billions to stop this type of fire. At least as far as I know. It is possible for Canada to enlist military personnel to assist in the effort but Alberta has BIG problems with working with the federal government so it is increidbly unlikely that any politician in Alberta would ask the feds for help, it would be political suicide.
I do not know about the cause of the eastern fires my guess is those are more foresty in nature which would explain why the smoke is so fucking bad. If you have ever tossed a spruce branch on a fire you will know why.
This may be opinion but the eastern fires are made MUCH WORSE by the fact that Canada does not do controlled burns as far as i know and well Canada shares something with Alberta, it is fucking huge and mostly filled with SPF trees
TLDR: Prairie wildfires are caused by intensive agricultural practices and are much rarer than forest fires.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-alberta-braces-wildfires-spread-winds-shift-2023-05-16/
some neat photos of the smoke blanketing Calgary, Alberta’s biggest City. Also some images of trees burning so maybe there was a forestry component to them.
http://www.iamcalgary.ca/dereks-top-5-must-visit-calgary-city-skyline-vantage-points/
if you scroll down there is the image of the peace bridge in clear weather can really show you the difference.
To make fire there’s three ingredients: oxygen (air), fuel (wood), and an initial spark/heat (summer).
During the summer when it’s hot, the forest is filled with dry woods cause the heat has reduced the moisture level. So during summer, wildfires are more susceptible; however, it’s not that simple.
Most wildfires are caused by human error/intervention. Like people who leave glass bottles, or dropped a lighter. These glass bottles, when the sun hits at the right angle can act as a magnifying glass – which will cause an initial spark that starts the fire. That’s why Smokey the Bear keeps saying “only YOU can prevent wildfires!”
They’re difficult to put out because when the wind blows, it makes the fire stronger because of the oxygen. And when the fire gets stronger, it spreads faster to the surrounding wood. Then with more wood increases the fire. It’s a vicious cycle.
Wildfires get out of control for a few reasons:
1) too much fuel load. You get years of leaf litter, fallen trees and branches, and it just builds up to the point where when it does catch fire, it gets uncontrollable very quickly.
2) a lot of the bigger trees have evolved to use fire as a way to indicate to them the best time to germinate, as there will be less competition for sunlight in a burnt area. As such, they have also co-evolved mechanisms that mean that their leaves and extremities burn fast and hot, leaving the trunks and heartwood relatively undamaged, so fires spread extremely fast and far when these trees catch fire.
3) by the time its burning at its peak, any water will evaporate before it can douse anything effectively.
There are ways to manage areas most at risk.
1) clearing the land, but this has a whole bunch of cost and ecological factors, so it’s used as a last resort more often than not.
2) control burns in cooler months. Do this regularly and in a controlled manner to manage fuel loads and ecological regeneration and it’ll be a far more effective way of managing wildfires than pretty much anything.
Why are they so difficult to put out? Extreme fires are not simply a line of fire (as low intensity fires often are). The rising hot air carries burning material up and “forward”, and dry/hot conditions allow those embers to ignite where they land. This means to stop it, you need to stop the constant ignition that may be occurring a mile (or more ahead of it). Extinguishing every flame, dozens of miles wide, a mile deep, moving a few miles an hour over inaccessible terrain? Almost impossible. The only way is to try and pre-burn an area in front of it – if weather/fuel/topological conditions allow and hope it won’t result in another uncontrollable fire.
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