Canadian author John Vaillant’s account of the unprecedented blaze that laid waste to Fort McMurray, Alberta, in 2016 so chillingly echoes the stories of the fires in Hawaii this week that it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. “At midday the town’s fire chief was telling folks that the fire service could handle it. By 1.30pm the blaze was already consuming the edge of the city,” Vaillant writes. The McMurray fire destroyed the homes of over 80,000 people and one expert likens it to the fire-bombing of Hamburg. “We are beyond the normal scope of fire,” Vaillant writes. “This is the kind of energy that does not burn but vaporises, an energy more often associated with lasers, atom bombs and suns.” Racing through the blaze with the energy of a thriller writer, Vaillant uses McMurray’s fall to unpick what he calls the new reality of fire in the twenty-first century – hot, dry weather, high winds and cities built forgetting the lessons of nature. Sadly, he couldn’t have picked a better week for publication.
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