Australian lessons unfolding in Alberta

Alberta fires - too
big to control.

How do you stop a big, fast-moving wildfire like the one ravaging Fort McMurray, Alberta? The answer is, you can’t.

Don Whittemore, a senior disaster response manager from Boulder, Colo., who has trained teams of firefighters in the United States and abroad, compared the task to “trying to stop a hurricane from hitting the Eastern Seaboard.”

Wildfires are fought from the air and on the ground in a coordinated offensive meant to keep them from spreading. If the fire can be denied access to fresh terrain and fresh fuel, it will dwindle and burn itself out. But when strong, shifting winds are driving the flames, as in Alberta, the fire can move unpredictably and leap far beyond fire breaks and other obstacles like rivers and highways, making containment efforts futile and dangerous.

Read The New York Times story - “Forces of Nature Conspire Against Firefighters Around Fort McMurray.”

(Is this similar to Australia’s future? Bushfires we can’t stop, control and whose final conclusion rests with a burst of rain, a downpour that is in its affect the opposite of the hot, dry and windy conditions brought on by human-induced climate change, both, interestingly, are a product of climate change – Robert McLean.)