Trump says Canadian wildfire smoke is “poisoning” U.S. air | The Current

[00:00:00]Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is the current podcast.

[00:00:05]>> My hole across my front of my house was on fire. The trailer's on fire. Another boat's on fire and it looks like it ranging and it's coming out on the other side and coming down by the garage and then my car lights on fire and I can watch and you can see it on the video of the pulsating of the booms from the car exploding. My car windows were blown out and that's when sparks started flying and it hit the house and lit the decks on fire.

[00:00:31]>> Jennifer Vanderho watched on the security cameras as her home and business went up in flames. She's an owner of the Open Bay Lodge about 150 kilometers northwest of Thunder Bay.

[00:00:43]Vanderho is one of more than 2,000 people who have been displaced by wildfires ripping throughout northern Ontario. Across the country, 200 wildfires are burning out of control, sending giant plumes of smoke across the continent and catching the attention of the US president. Donald Trump isn't the only can rep only only Republican threatening to take action on the smoke.

[00:01:06]US Senator Bernie Marino plans to introduce a bill that would sanction Canadian officials and declare Canada's ambassador personana nonrada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford spoke to reporters yesterday and had this response. You know something? Rather than criticize and threaten uh Canada, your closest friends, maybe one day you're going to need our help like it did last year and we deployed the people. I get frustrated uh just listening these that bunch of rubbish.

[00:01:34]>> So, how well is Canada managing its forests as climate change intensifies?

[00:01:40]And what's the best way to limit the harm done by wildfires? Bob Gray is a wildland fire ecologist and he runs RW Grey Consulting based in Chilowak, BC.

[00:01:51]Good morning, Bob.

[00:01:52]>> Good morning, Rebecca.

[00:01:54]>> What do you make of President Trump's comments? Has Canada dropped the ball in some way?

[00:02:01]>> Well, it's it's very nuanced. I mean u we can segregate our landscape into areas where we have direct management of the forest where there's good road access and then we have a whole lot of Canada which is just it's not roaded there's no access the fires coming out of those areas are driven by climate change um and you know bit of fire exclusion that went on for the last century as well but really much is driven by climate change and there's really not much we can do about those areas the areas where we are doing direct forest management yeah we could be doing a lot more as far as fuels management, prescribed burning, cultural burning to reduce, you know, the chance for high severity fire and big smoke events.

[00:02:41]>> We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But I am curious, what do we know about how the wildfires in Ontario started?

[00:02:48]>> Those were lightning. That was a lightning storm on the 12th or 11th and it touched off uh several hundred individual fires. Uh, and of course, you know, once you got a whole bunch of fires going in those areas, strong winds, get them going, there's not much you can do. It's very dangerous to put, you know, anybody in the way of those things. So, you you basically just have to back off and wait for the weather to change or let them to grow together or um there's not much you can do when you've got 600,000 hectares on fire.

[00:03:15]>> And these are fires that have begun in areas that are not serviced by roads.

[00:03:20]>> Correct.

[00:03:22]>> Okay. So prescribed burning there for instance is not really an option.

[00:03:26]>> No, you have to um you have to anchor your prescribed burning to something so that you know it's a very distinct area working in. And also the scale I mean we you know prescribed burns of a couple hundred hectares to a couple thousand hectares. That's a that's a big burn but we're talking about you know 1.2 billion hectares of the boreal forest. So no prescribed burning at that scale is not an option. So, how how do prescribed burns work and and where do they work best? Where do we see Canada doing it already?

[00:03:58]>> So, prescribed burns um they function to reduce surface fuels uh for the most part. And surface fuels are what drive the whole system. You don't get crown fire without surface fuels. So, so they really do they eat up all the grass and litter and branches and things like that. And it really has a big impact on future fire behavior. Where it's being applied the most right now is in British Columbia. each of the provinces are starting to, you know, look closely at it. Um, BC is doing a, you know, a couple hundred prescribed burns a year, but all told, I mean, there's maybe 10,000 hectares of prescribed burning across Canada. Parks Canada leads the way in most of it, but like I said, there's there's definitely a lot of interest in it. Uh, but it's it's now an issue of building capacity to do it.

[00:04:41]>> I know you used to work in the US. Uh, do they do they do more of it there?

[00:04:46]>> By far. There's the US, all the different agencies, tribes, they conduct about 150,000 prescribed burns a year over about four million hectares.

[00:04:58]>> And is it effective? Do we know if that's working to reduce the number of wildfires?

[00:05:03]>> It's very effective. Um, you know, in the southeast where they do a lot of prescribed burning, you know, the majority is done down there. They they really does have a big impact on large fires. It's occurring more in the west uh in the places where it's been applied and it's been challenged by wildfire. Uh it's been very effective, but scale is so critical where it where it's applied and where it can intersect with a fire.

[00:05:25]It's very effective, but if you're not doing enough of it, it's not going to intersect with wildfires.

[00:05:30]>> I just want to you talked about cultural burning as well. What is that?

[00:05:34]>> The cultural burning is is indigenous fire stewardship and it's it's it's basically how you survived on these landscapes. And it was also a a very significant source of diversity in these landscapes. So indigenous people for thousands of years used fire for food, medicinal security uh to provide firewood and it was a very strong cultural um activity as well. It it it bound people and families together. So So if you didn't have fire on Canada's landscape prior to European colonization, you didn't survive. So it was an extremely important tool of survival. Why do you think we're not doing more prescribed burning in Canada then? I mean, you talked in part it's the landscape of Canada that so much of it is for forested and not uh reachable through regular means, but but but why not more? You talked about funding as well.

[00:06:24]>> Yeah. So, in BC um they were doing about 100,000 hectares a year up until the early 1990s and that was a combination of of wildlife habitat burning as well as slash burning. Uh it was a activity conducted posth harvest that and then you planted the site uh and there were there were a fair number of escapes and they smoked out communities uh and there was a reaction to it and it basically came to a grinding halt. Ontario um 1970s there was a very horrible accident and escape prescribed burn that killed six young forest rangers. Um so it fell out of favor um and it didn't have a lot of really strong champions. So, you know, we don't have a lot of fire ecologists in Canada, and it's the fire ecologists who kind of drive the need for fire as an ecological process. So, like I said, it's it's certainly gaining in acceptance and understanding now. Um um so we can expect to see more of it, but it's going to take quite a while to build the capacity to do it, and you have to have, you know, very stable funding.

[00:07:26]>> Are there other lessons from the US that you think we might learn here?

[00:07:31]>> Uh not really. I mean, the US fights fire the same as we do. I mean, we we send uh we deploy resources to the US and they deploy resources here. They work side by side. They're they're trained under the same, you know, system. Uh they work under the ICS, incident command system. So, they do things very similar. It's just scale is just such a big issue with this. And they've got the people. If you're going to do 150,000 prescribed burns a year, you have to have the manpower to do that. Um we would never reach that level. Um, but you know, there's not a lot that we can't learn from them or they can't learn from us. We just need to do more. [clears throat] >> What about when there when we're actually attacking a fire and you're at the stage where there's a wildfire burning out of control and it is encroaching on a community? What do we do a good job in in dealing with that?

[00:08:21]>> We do a very good job. Um, we have a very high success rate. I think it's about 93 or 94% catching most fires at less than less than 10 hectares or so.

[00:08:31]Uh so and we have very professional, very competent, very well-trained crews.

[00:08:36]Um you know, we could probably use more manpower. Um and we could be using that manpower both during the fire season to fight fires, but as well as in the shoulder seasons to do more of this fuels work, prescribed burning, uh you know, mechanical and manual thinning, those sort of things. So um we we do a very good job once the fires break out.

[00:08:57]We just need to do more upfront mitigation.

[00:09:01]Right. A lot of the funding that the way that we do it now is that the funding comes when the fires break out and then you throw money at it to put it out.

[00:09:07]Right. And and so is there a political will, do you think, to to get on the front end of the fires before they happen?

[00:09:14]>> I I think there is. The question now is is, you know, where where do we find the funding? I mean, do we continue to use taxpayers money? Do we use a combination of taxpayers money plus we look for outside sources, foundations, things like that? Um there's a lot of those conversations going on right now like how do we fund this at large scale and consistently. Um but yeah, historically it's been response and recovery has gotten the majority of the funding in upfront mitigation. And you cynically, you know, politician might say that well, you know, it you can see a result when you see aircraft in the air, but you you don't see a result when we spend a billion dollars up front and and basically the fire never hit the area we treated. So, um, I don't accept that argument. I think that we I think the public would be very accepting of a lot of upfront mitigation work. I know the communities that I work with, they love to hear the chainsaws and they are very accepting of the smoke.

[00:10:10]>> What about a national firefighting strategy? Doug Ford has called for that.

[00:10:14]Would that, do you think help in in in reaching the goal that we're looking for here in having fewer fires reaching communities?

[00:10:21]>> No, I don't think so. Um, you know, like I said, the the the solution to this is is grassroots. It's at the local and regional level where you have that year-round workforce. You know, people who they do the training and and and planning over the winter. During the spring, they start doing prescribed burning and fuels work during the summer. They're fully trained and operational to augment agency staff for firefighting. And then once the fire season's over, they're back to doing prescribed burning and fuels work.

[00:10:49]That's how you get out ahead of this problem. uh another seasonal um national workforce that doesn't you're still just responding. You're not doing mitigation and response. We have to combine those two activities.

[00:11:02]>> Okay, Bob Gray, we'll leave it there. I appreciate your time for this. Thank you.

[00:11:06]>> You're very welcome. Have a good day.

[00:11:07]>> Bob Gray is a wildland fire ecologist.

[00:11:10]He runs RW Grey Consulting in Chilowak, BC.

[00:11:16]Jen Beverly is an associate professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta. She is also a former Ontario fire ranger. Good morning.

[00:11:25]>> Good morning.

[00:11:26]>> We heard from Bob Gray there that um mitigation and prescribed burns might be a part of the solution here. What do you think of that?

[00:11:35]>> Well, absolutely. I think there's there's lots of regions of the country.

[00:11:39]there's lots of locations where um mitigation is is a is a good investment and and and should be pursued. Um but there's other parts of the country the the ecosystems are different. Uh the types of fire regimes are different and the scale of the problem um really isn't compatible with a mitigation um focus.

[00:12:03]>> What do you mean by that?

[00:12:05]>> Well, you know the the boreal forest. So the boreal forest is a vast ecosystem.

[00:12:10]Uh it it it stretches right across the country country. There's actually 55% of Canada's land base is is uh um the boreal zone and and that's a crown fire ecosystem. So those those kinds of fires are um very much part of the natural process in renewing the forests. We have fire adapted species in the boreal.

[00:12:36]these they've evolved with fire and they burn intensely. Uh so these are extremely different than the kinds of forests in in the United States um that are very conducive to fuel management.

[00:12:52]They're very different than the interior BC forests for example um in southern BC. And these are are are ecosystems that first of all they cover an enormous area and and they're not they're they're designed to burn and so you can go in there and try to um redesign a forest so it's less flammable but but that's not going to lead to uh resilient ecosystems and the the potential for altering fire behavior in there is limited. Mhm. How how do you think your experience as a fire ranger influenced the way you now think about managing wildfires?

[00:13:32]>> Yeah. Well, it's I think it's had a profound imp impact on the way I think about research and the and the problems.

[00:13:38]Um, you know, I'm I'm very my research program, my lab, we're very focused on trying to pri provide tools that are practical that can be uh put into to use right away by managers who have to make tough decisions about fire. You talked about how some fires are designed to burn, but that creates smoke and it creates angst for people who are, you know, maybe have health problems and are living with that smoke or just concern that it's moving somewhere near them. Is there is there any reason or anything we can do to to mitigate those fires that though they're not coming near a community, they are creating a health hazard?

[00:14:17]>> Right. So, you you know, we we have a flammable landscape. We've got a lot a lot of people embedded within that and and that's different than maybe the the situation a couple hundred years ago. So so so what do you do about that? You c you can eliminate fire. Uh you can uh absolutely look at vulnerabilities in those communities. You can identify vulnerable populations um segments of the population, people with asthma, the elderly. uh um you can look at solutions to try to alleviate um what they're experiencing. So there you know that that could be creating centers that people can go to so that they um where there's there's air air filtration and you're you're not breathing the smoke. Um and in terms of keeping people safe, it's about looking at scenarios for evacuations, making plans so that um you can alert people, you can communicate with them and give them guidance and get them out of harm's way in the event of a fire. So, you know, there's definitely proactive things that can be done to go and prepare for what what could be an an inevitable fire. Uh, and make sure that uh you're getting people safely out of harm's way and that you're trying to reduce their exposure to smoke, staying indoors, having alerts uh air quality alerts that are already in place. Um, those are really helpful for for guiding people to reduce their exposure to smoke.

[00:15:50]>> You heard Bob say that he has no interest in seeing any kind of uh national uh organization that would oversee fires. What do you make of that?

[00:15:58]Do you think we need some sort of national fire administration?

[00:16:02]>> I haven't seen that myself. um in in terms of a need, you know, uh the the natural resources, the forest resources, that's that's provincial jurisdiction that's set out in the constitution. Uh agencies that that fight fires in Canada, uh they do that extremely well.

[00:16:20]Um they also coordinate extremely well through the Canadian Inter Agency Forest Fire Center. uh and and I haven't seen um what what would what would trigger the need for a change in in in that that structure. I think if if um if there is a need, you know, the the the people asking for that would be the agencies and I haven't heard it from them. Um so, you know, if we look at the Ontario Fire Management Agency or the Alberta Fire Management Agency or or BC or other provinces, I I haven't heard anybody say, "Well, we we need a federal involvement. We need more bureaucracy.

[00:16:56]We we need another layer of governance uh during these situations. I think um yeah, so I haven't heard that.

[00:17:02]>> What would you rate us then? I mean, if you were to look at how we fight fires, how we mitigate for fires on the front end, the ones that you know, what we can do in communities, do do you I mean, would you give us what kind of grade would you give Canada then? Because as you heard, Donald Trump thinks we're doing a pretty poor job.

[00:17:18]>> I think Canada's uh you know, managing fires and managing forests exceptionally well. Um and there's and all the evidence points to that. So, you know, Canadian agencies are very successful.

[00:17:29]Um they respond to and put out, you know, somewhere around 95% of of of new fires that are ignited. Uh and the small number of fires that do escape and become large. Really, that's that's driven by by extreme weather conditions and um and we're seeing a changing climate that's producing more opportunities for those extreme weather conditions. So I, you know, it's really a climate change issue that's that's driving the problem.

[00:17:56]>> Yeah. Are you are you concerned of of by what you're seeing? We see these massive fires that take over entire communities and burn them to the ground. I mean, what are your thoughts on on on just the the picture right now?

[00:18:09]>> You know, it's devastating. It's it's devastating to watch um what happens when a fire moves into a populated area.

[00:18:17]And I I really feel for the people impacted. Uh people who are displaced, people who are losing their homes. Um it you know it it's it's horrific really and and it's it's an enormous problem and on an enormous scale and we're I think as a nation we're doing the best we can to manage a very uh difficult situation. And for the most part, you know, people are are being evacuated successfully. Um communities that that are impacted. Um what I see is a lot of resilience in terms of recovery and moving forward and rebuilding and and adopting fires smart principles. Um and a lot of communities are are taking action at the property scale. Homeowners are are looking at how to reduce the receptivity of their properties to an ignition. Uh you know that can be really simple things like changing uh the roofing materials and removing vegetation around their homes. So, you know, I I I see a lot of good things happening.

[00:19:17]>> Jen, I Yeah, we have to go, but I I just want to point out that I know there is uh later today a press conference with a whole bunch of different First Nations talking about how they feel as though the province has let them down. We're going to hear more about that later on today, but Jen Beverly, I appreciate your time today. Thank you for this.

[00:19:32]>> Thank you for having me.

[00:19:34]>> Jen Beverly is an associate professor of wildland fire at the University of Alberta.

[00:19:39]>> You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway.

[00:19:42]Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.