In this video, Member of Parliament Arnold Viersen speaks out against the $15 million reduction in Alberta’s provincial budget for wildfire suppression. The funds allotted for air tankers was cut by $5.1 million while the base wildfire management budget was slashed by $9.6 million.
“The province has reduced the operating contracts, for not just us but the other air tanker operator, from 123 days to 93 days,” [Mr. Lane] said.
“Effectively that will mean that all the air tanker assets in Alberta will come up contract by August 16. The province has no guarantee of availability after that period of those air tanker assets.”
From the Edmonton Journal:
With dry conditions and dozens of blazes already burning across Alberta, Premier Rachel Notley said Tuesday her government’s decision to slash the wildfire budget by $15 million this year won’t impact the province’s firefighting efforts.
Notley chalked the matter up to simple budgetary practices that has the province earmark base funding, with the understanding firefighting efforts are covered in the province’s emergency budget.
“In no way, shape or form are we suggesting that we wouldn’t put every bit of resources that are required to ensure that fires are appropriately fought as they arise,” Notley told reporters at a Red Deer news conference. “This is the way these kinds of emergent and non-predictable costs are typically budgeted.”
Last year, the province spent $375 million fighting wildfires; none of that money was earmarked in the budget, but instead came directly from emergency funding.
After [the air tanker] contracts expire Aug. 16, the province will hire planes on case by case basis as needed, but critics say that could leave the government in a vulnerable position if companies look for longer-term contracts elsewhere.
Firefighters can be seen on the left side of the smoke column escaping from a swirling vortex created by a wildfire at Big Lake in the Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park in Alberta. Screen grab from the Diane Logan video below.
Firefighters from Alberta’s St. Albert Fire Department had a close call Thursday April 14 while fighting a wildfire at Big Lake in the Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park (map). The fire intensity increased very suddenly as the flames moved into a heavy patch of flashy fuel. The heated, rising air began swirling or rotating in a manner that is not uncommon on wildfires. This is usually called a “fire whirl”. But it kept building and growing larger — beyond what most firefighters would call a fire whirl and approached what is sometimes known as a “fire tornado”.
In the image above and the video below, firefighters on the left side of the smoke column were forced to run away from the very extreme fire behavior. One of them, Vincent Pashko, a nine-year veteran with the St. Albert fire department, can be seen emerging from the smoke sprinting toward the Sturgeon River. Here is an excerpt from the St. Albert Gazette:
…“Before I knew it, I heard the guys screaming at me, ‘Watch out!’” Pashko said.
“I turned around and I saw this big wall of hot ash coming towards me.”
Paschko turned away and could feel the heat burning the back of his ears and neck. “Holy smokes,” he recalled thinking, “this is more serious than I thought.”
Paschko ran into the Sturgeon [River] and dunked his head underwater for protection.
“I was booting it! I could have won the Olympics this year, I think!”
While this was definitely a close call, Paschko said at the time he was more worried about his fellow firefighters, as he wasn’t sure if they had been caught up in the blaze. When he heard them calling him, he shouted back, “I’m OK, I’m OK,” and returned to shore.
The vortex itself, which rose up several hundred feet, swirled out over the water and petered out about halfway across the river, [Stewart] Loomis said.
Pashko said he was taken to the Sturgeon Community Hospital after he had calmed down a bit where he was treated for smoke inhalation. He was back at work Friday with a bit of blistering around his ears, face, and the back of his neck…
The video below was filmed by Diane Logan. Click the arrows at bottom-right to see it in full-screen mode.
Truly incredible video of fire tornado that happened during brush fire causing our firefighter to escape into river pic.twitter.com/8BdeZDfeL5
British Columbia wildland fire personnel are coming back to work for the season and one of the first things Type 1 firefighters do is take the Canadian fitness test. The WFX-FIT, which first saw widespread use in 2012, is described as “a valid job-related physical performance standard used to determine whether an individual possesses the physical capabilities necessary to meet the rigorous demands encountered while fighting wildland fires.”
The components of the WFX-FIT, after pre-participation screening are:
Firefighters must complete all of the tasks within 14:20 or 17:15 minutes, depending on the province and the location (in or out of the province) of the assignment.
The fossil of a pine tree was preserved as charcoal within rocks in Nova Scotia
From the BBC:
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“The charred pine twigs date back 140 million years to a time when fires raged across large tracts of land. Pine trees now dominate the forests of the Northern Hemisphere.
False color image of the fossilized pine twig that is a few milimeters long. Photo by H. Falcon-Lang.
The research suggests the tree’s evolution was shaped in the fiery landscape of the Cretaceous, where oxygen levels were much higher than today, fuelling intense and frequent wildfires.
“Pines are well adapted to fire today,” said Dr Howard Falcon-Lang of Royal Holloway, University of London, who discovered the fossils in Nova Scotia, Canada.
“The fossils show that wildfires raged through the earliest pine forests and probably shaped the evolution of this important tree.”
Serendipitous find
The specimens, which are described in Geology journal, were preserved as charcoal within rocks from a quarry.
“It was only when I digested [the samples] in acid that these beautiful fossils fell out,” Dr Falcon-Lang told BBC News.
“They were sitting in my cupboard for five years before I actually worked out what was there.”
Plant oddities
The fossils are just a few mm long but probably came from trees resembling the Scots Pine that now cover large areas of Scotland.
“One of the oddities about pine trees today is that they are one of the most fire adapted species on our planet,” explained Dr Falcon-Lang.
“These oldest pine fossils are preserved as charcoal, the product of fire, suggesting that the co-occurrence of fire and pines is something that’s very ancient, that goes back to the very origin of these first pine trees.”
Dr Falcon-Lang plans to return to the quarry this summer to recover more specimens.”
The range of Western Larch, Larix occidentalis, sometimes called Western tamarack. From Natural Resources Canada.
Warming caused by climate change is moving the suitable habitat for some plant species farther north in the northern hemisphere. A plant that was once comfortable in one location may be finding it is becoming too warm for it to thrive.
British Columbia, unlike the other Canadian provinces, has changed their rules about replanting forests, hoping to ensure that adapted tree varieties can keep up with the moving habitats. Critics say assisted migration, as it is called, has sometimes produced disastrous results in the past when species were placed in new environments.
Western Larch, a deciduous conifer. Photo from Montana Outdoors.
Vice’s Motherboard web site has a fascinating article by Stephen Buranyi on the subject. Here is an excerpt:
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“The Western Larch can live for hundreds of years and grow to over 200 feet, but the oldest Larch trees in northern British Columbia’s Bulkley Valley are only about four feet tall. In fact, the nearest full grown Western Larch is nearly 900 kilometers south by the US border, which has been the Larch’s natural range for thousands of years. These are the first trees of their kind to be planted so far north.
If the disastrous history of invasive species has taught us anything, it’s that it’s often difficult to predict the consequences of such a change. Ecologists and conservationists generally caution against moving a species outside of the areas they naturally live—a process known as assisted migration—and governments generally agree with this take. Across North America there are strict prohibitions against the large scale movement of living populations.
But for the past seven years the province of BC has allowed millions of trees to be planted toward the northernmost reaches of their natural range and beyond. The government is working with scientists who predict that our climate is changing so quickly that, 50 years from now, when the trees are fully grown, the conditions in the trees’ new homes will actually be more like their old ones.
“It restores the tree to the environment for which they are best suited,” said Greg O’Neill, an adaptation and climate change scientist with the BC government, who helped design and implement the province’s assisted migration program. But while BC scientists think that they’ve acted just in time to prepare their forests for the future, no other province appears ready to adopt assisted migration as a strategy anytime soon.
Many trees are what ecologists call foundational species—organisms whose removal would cause enormous disruption in the ecosystem. Trees are a sort of infrastructure for forests; they bind the soil, retain water, and provide food and shelter. Just like the infrastructure unpinning cities, it takes years to establish a tree population, and they are virtually impossible to move.
And yet, because BC’s northern regions are warming at nearly twice the average rate, much of the province’s 55 million hectares of forest may find that their homes have moved north without them. A 2006 paper from the University of British Columbia applied a climate based model to forest ecosystems and showed that some species ranges could shift by up to 100 kilometers each decade.
Rules in BC require that, as trees are cut down, planters use seeds from the same area to re-plant, preserving the genetic character of the forest. O’Neill and his colleagues produced a forestry report in 2008 that drew on the projected range expansions due to climate change, and their own extensive experiments testing various tree species in different climates. They suggested that the province instead expand the distance seeds could be moved uphill, to track with global warming. Later that year the Chief Forester’s Standards for Seed Use were changed for the majority of BC’s commercial tree species to reflect the suggestions in the report.
According to O’Neill, “these were the first policy changes that addressed climate change in forestry.”
Then, in 2010 the standards were changed again, to allow Western Larch to be planted hundreds of kilometres away from its current range. “That had been a long-standing paradigm that no-one dared transgress,” said O’Neill. One ecologist had even called BC’s migration plans “a little scary.”
It’s difficult to overstate how deeply rooted the aversion to moving nature is for many biologists. In 2009 assisted migration was called “planned invasion” in a report that listed our really awful, truly just stupendously bad track record with species that unexpectedly turn invasive…”
