I know I’m not the only one watching the Los Angeles fires and asking myself an almost forbidden question: could my city burn too?
Prompt your favourite search engine with “The Great Fire of …” and the algorithms will oblige with suggestions for cities great and small. But most date to the early 1900s, the 1800s or even earlier. For so many decades, city-cindering cataclysms seemed consigned to history.
The Los Angeles fires are devastating, tragic and absolutely shocking, but how is it that we’re still surprised? Are we unable to register even the recent names? Valparaiso, Lahaina, Santa Rosa, Paradise…. Even the Canadian ones? Lytton, Jasper, Fort McMurray. Is any city safe if vicious fires can erupt even during springtime in the Maritimes, as Nova Scotians around Halifax learned not long ago?
John Vaillant is one of the people I most wanted to ask. His book Fire Weather, about the Fort McMurray “Beast” of 2016, was the most-recommended non-fiction title by readers last year. It vividly articulates the accelerating Pyrocene era and the trouble we’re having catching up psychologically to the world we’re changing physically. Vaillant’s got a way with words, as you might imagine, coining terms like “21st century fire” to describe modern infernos and “Homo flagrans” to encapsulate the deep history and probable future of our species. Vaillant lives in Vancouver but happened to be in Southern California visiting family (he’s safely away from the fires). I caught up with him and posed the nagging question: can my city burn, too?
“Yes,” Vaillant replied without hesitation. (Sometimes the most potent way with words is the fewest.)
“Basically, yes,” Vaillant told me. “I don’t expect downtown high rises to burn necessarily but houses are very susceptible to fire and things are much more precarious now.”
Fire Weather by Knopf Canada, photo by John Sinal
I’ve edited our conversation for length and clarity. Vaillant spent seven years studying 21st century fire to write Fire Weather, and here’s some of what he thinks we ought to know:
John Vaillant: Yeah, your city can burn. Just look at the Vancouver fires in August. Those were not big fires, but they very nearly became big fires. And even without being big fires they maxed out the Vancouver Fire department (which isn't small) to the point that they were having to call in mutual aid from Richmond and Surrey — and that was for two condo fires.
And what if the conditions had been a little different? Imagine if those fires had ignited during the heat dome. Imagine if they had ignited when 30 knots of wind were blowing down Georgia Strait. Those fires would have been national headlines.
The fires we've been having all over the world for the past decade should be bursting the bubble for everybody in any kind of settled community.
Chris Hatch: You wrote in Fire Weather about this new era, the Pyrocene, as well as the “Petrocene” that fueled it and the shocking power of “21st century fire.”
JV: That is what we inhabit now. And we base our assumptions about nature, and about all kinds of things, on past experience, which has been a pretty good way to go. It's been a pretty good method for making sense of the world in the past. Remember that Marshall McLuhan line: “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
What climate change does is it basically weaponizes natural systems and turns them into something most of us had never imagined. And so we don't. We can't imagine a metre of rain falling on the mountains of North Carolina, following Hurricane Helene — more than a metre of rain fell on Houston, Texas, in the middle of Hurricane Harvey — or fires burning with the intensity that destroyed Lytton in 2021. [The fire] burned it to the ground in 45 minutes after breaking the Canadian heat record for four days in a row and topping out at 49.6 C. So that's the world we live in now, and it's not one we really are very good at imagining or responding to meaningfully. But that is now what's possible.
The menu has been expanded and we are still living and building like it's 1990, and that is going to come back to bite us. There are tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles now who are really suffering because they basically were inhabiting a 20th century neighborhood in a 21st century fire regime.
CH: Fires in the wildland-urban interface are one thing but zero-containment fires right in major cities? Has climate change overwhelmed modern building codes and firefighting systems?
JV: It’s also that every community is just full of petroleum products. Think of the typical modern house — it’s full of hydrocarbons. It’s not just the wood that burns but all the petroleum products that compose its shingles. It's vinyl siding, all the furnishings, all the stuffing in the furnishings. There's a huge amount of flammable substance in the modern house, and we really saw that in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
But we also saw it in Fort McMurray. Those houses burnt to the ground in five or 10 minutes. That’s pretty hard to imagine for a $750,000, two-storey house built to 21st century standards. But they actually burn like milk cartons, and that is a sobering prospect, especially in a more flammable world.
[Note: In Fire Weather, Vaillant describes test burns of rooms filled with natural furnishings compared to synthetic petrochemical-based ones. The plastic-filled rooms fill with toxic smoke and reach “flashover” with shocking speed.]
CH: When you think about Canadian cities, we know that an area like B.C.’s Okanagan is at high risk but what regions do you worry about?
JV: It ain't rocket science — when it's hotter and drier fires burn more easily and more explosively and throw embers out there, and they all catch. Think about New England and New York last November. Hundreds of fires burning in an environment that is typically cold and wet at that time of year, much like Ontario and Quebec would be in November. And instead, New England burned, as it never really has before at that time of year and firefighters were killed in the process — in New England of all places. There were fires in New York, right in the middle of Brooklyn. And that's not a world we're used to living in.
If that can happen to Brooklyn, you know that Victoria can burn, Vancouver can burn or Calgary.
But also, I think Ottawa and the suburbs of Toronto, Edmonton. All bets are off now…
The world changed around Vancouver, and the world changed around Regina, and the world changed around Ottawa, and new new things are possible now. I’m not giving a likelihood but just look at the evidence: It's irrational to think, “Oh, well, yeah, that can happen in Fort McMurray, and that can happen in Lytton. But that'll never happen here.”
CH: You wrote Fire Weather before the horrendous Canadian wildfires of 2023. Is there anything you would add or update?
JV: Yeah. I would. I talked about insurance in Fire Weather, but I would lean on that more. There's where we're in a total crisis and a regime change right now.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat from Rhode Island, summed it up this past June. “This isn't complicated,” he said: “Climate risk makes things uninsurable. No insurance makes things unmortgageable. No mortgages crashes the property markets. Crashed property markets trash the economy.”
They haven't even really begun to assess the rebuild of just a couple of neighborhoods in Los Angeles but they're already over $100 billion. Add the damage for Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton. You might be at half a trillion. And this is one year. This isn't even a year. It's just a few months. How many of those can you handle?
Now, it's going to be worse, and it's going to be a lot more expensive. And so, you know, if you're a big fan of capitalism and investment and markets, why would you endorse and enable governments supporting entities that are actually compromising the stability of those very markets?
CH: Well, a lot of people are marching backwards but I’ve also heard you describe it as a form of moral cowardice.
JV: Well, that’s part of it. But I think it's more about greed. And for a select group of the one per cent, they are okay with collapse because they feel immune to it, or they've made preparations. And you know there are tables full of billionaires at Trump's inauguration. They're masters of the universe right now, and it suits them… But, you know, billionaires' homes burned last week in Los Angeles, in Pacific Palisades. And so that creates an interesting tension.
And political action is still available to us. Voting for people who take climate change seriously. Mark Carney is a guy who recognizes and articulates the threat of climate change. Whether he's a Liberal or a Communist is not of great interest to me. What is interesting to me is that in 2015 he had the ear of Lloyds of London, one of the biggest insurance companies in the world, saying climate poses a real threat to everything that “we” care about — namely, our investments and our profits.
I quoted him a couple of times in Fire Weather because he was deeply involved in financial markets and capitalism and saw the writing on the wall and was telling his pals in those luncheons “wake up.” He's dialed into reality, and yet he can engage very effectively with the powers that be.
CH: It seems particularly bizarre how little mention there is of climate change and fossil fuels in the coverage of the L.A. fires. Even politicians in California make the connection more than most — California is currently suing Big Oil over its disinformation campaigns and damages while Los Angeles was the first U.S. city to endorse an international treaty to wind down fossil fuels.
JV: That's the elephant in the living room, though. There's lots of evidence out there about what petroleum companies have known, and when they knew it, and this is all in the public record now. So we have to do some due diligence, and we have to push the media and push our politicians to acknowledge it. And so, I'm trying to do that.
And what I’ve found is that a lot of people do want to know. People don't want their neighbourhoods to burn.
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