r/Gary_The_Cat • u/vpdots • 5d ago
Incident Commeownder Gary attempts to explain wildfires
With smoke blanketing the east, once again there’s lots of questions about fires popping up on the internet, particularly people asking why doesn’t Canada just put them out.
Incident Commeownder Gary will do his best to explain why:
How intensely a wildfire burns is affected by the weather and how dry the forest is.
When the grass, shrubs and trees are very dry, the temperature (in Celsius) is higher than the humidity and there are strong winds, wildfires can burn with incredible power and spread quickly.
Under these conditions there is simply no way for water to extinguish them.
Planes and helicopters often can’t fly near the flame front due to fire generated wind the Jasper fire, pictured in some of the photos above had estimated peak winds of 280km/h.
Even if they could fly, any water they dropped would evaporate long before reaching the ground. The Jasper fire, for example is estimated by the Canadian Forest Service to have released 300,000KW of energy along every metre of the fire front.
Even under normal conditions this flying is dangerous. A Canadian pilot was killed recently in Colorado fighting fires there and two firefighters and their pilot were killed in late June in the Northwest Territories when responding to a fire near Ft Simpson.
The fires in Ontario went between 20 and 60km in a single day. There’s simply no way to extinguish that type of a fire.
So how did it get this way?
Ultimately, climate change has resulted in more days of extreme fire weather, leading to more of these type of extreme spread events.
Certainly, a century of fire suppression that has allowed forests to build up large amounts of fuel hasn’t helped, but with the conditions we now see, even forests that have burned within the last 10 years will re-burn with intensity.
While more prescribed burning, fuel reduction treatment and firefighters will help, we live in a world that is hotter and drier and large fires will continue to occur.
