Only because I have Canadian friends (and so do you all- Redkitten!) am I aware that Canada is dealing with a horrifying forest fire:
The sky in Fort McMurray now looks like a wall of fire and smoke as a mammoth inferno swallows parts of the Canadian city.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of about 80,000 people, including the entire city of Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo said Wednesday.
The blaze has already destroyed 80% of Fort McMurray’s Beacon Hill community, RM Wood Buffalo said. Well over a dozen homes burned down, but the full breadth of the destruction remains unclear.
The videos are terrifying. Let’s keep our neighbors to the north in our thoughts.
Comrade Mary
Thanks, John. All my Alberta family are closer to Calgary than Fort Mac, but it’s still scary.
You can follow updates on Twitter here.
The Canadian Red Cross is taking donations now.
Mike J
Saw footage on twitter of a hotel fully engulfed in flames, not one fire truck near it because it just couldn’t be a priority.
JPL
The pictures are horrifying. I hope that they are able to contain the fire soon.
PhoenixRising
From northern Alberta to the Mekong Delta, where livestock are dying of heat stroke along with elephants and fish, that climate change we were warned to expect has arrived.
Gulp.
aimai
Good God how horrific. My thoughts are with everyone, everywhere. This is terrifying.
SuperHrefna
It’s terrifying. Those poor people.
I live on Long Island, an island where there is no realistic evacuation plan ( only three large-scale ways off the island, bridges near Manhattan and ferries at Port Jefferson and Orient Point) and so big and densely populated a huge number of the residents don’t seem to understand we don’t live on the continental US. I think, long term, Long Islanders are screwed.
LAO
@Comrade Mary: Thanks for the link. Done.
SuperHrefna
@Comrade Mary: Are the Canadian Red Cross less corrupt than the US Red Cross? I’d love to donate but the US branch has soured me on the RC – every disaster they collect funds and then give minimal or no help to those affected by the disaster.
Mike G
Our forest fires are going to be YUUUGE. World-class.
WJS
Cut to the guy who says “there’s no evidence fire actually destroys anything, and Jesus said so.”
Ryan
We’ll have the best forest fires. The best. Tremendous.
Major Major Major Major
Welp.
Hang in there, Wood Buffalo. (Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d type/see.)
Yutsano
@Comrade Mary: Friend has a stepdad who just got out before it got much worse. I have another friend who is closer but in a safe area. Big mess up there and no resources available to fight it really.
gvg
what exactly happened? lightning, drought, arson?
SiubhanDuinne
Sadly and ironically, today is National Firefighters’ Day.
The images from Fort Mac are horrifying.
Mnemosyne
Ugh. Hopefully US Forest Service and California firefighters are being called in to assist — sadly, we have a pretty good idea of how to handle gigantic wildfires after 5 years of drought.
? Martin
@SuperHrefna:
The ferries are not large-scale. There are 3 million people in Nassau/Suffolk county. Port Jefferson handles 3,000 people a day. In an emergency maybe that increases 10x. That’s nothing.
Evacuation of long island will not happen. You can shove everyone to one side to deal with southern approach tsunami and you could airlift with pretty much the entire US military assisting within a few weeks, but there’s no other way. And NYC is not better off with their bridges. Keeping that flowing will be a monumental effort, particularly if there is any measure of panic (and there always is).
SoCal is not much better off. We have a handful of exits through the mountains but they choke off even in the best of conditions. We can redistribute reasonably well (move from the coast inland a bit, etc.) but if a real disaster hit and we needed to get to another state, I expect that would take at least 2 weeks or more, especially since gas would likely run out fast here.
NorthLeft12
@gvg: I used to work up there in 1977/78 so obviously things have changed a lot, but to even think that it is dry enough now [beginning of May!] up there that this could happen is very scary. I have family that live south of Fort MacMurray [well, virtually everyone is south of Fort Mac] and they did say that they hardly had any snow, and that it is unbelievably warm for this time of year. How it got started I’m not sure anyone knows, but it is the conditions that set up this disaster.
The Dangerman
Trump Presidency? That’s Cleveland this Summer.
charluckles
It’s the heart of Canada’s oil sands extraction industry. Are we allowed to talk about that?
Comrade Mary
@SuperHrefna: They get the job done. There may be other volunteer agencies stepping in soon, but they seem pretty effective in the first period of time after a crisis.
beer time somewhere
A spring-time forest fire is one of the worst to have happen. There is none of the greenery that would help slow down the speed.
The forest floor is covered with the dead debris from the fall/winter which provides the fire with the fine fuels to get started and keep going. Now add 20-25C temps, 30-40Kph winds and low relative humidity, there is no hope to fight the fire front. All you can do is attack it from the sides and hope the weather changes to help.
Cermet
More Tar sands, anyone?
hedgehog the occasional commenter
@Comrade Mary: Donation sent. Thanks for the link.
Davebo
So sad. And Alberta’s already been hit hard by dirt cheap oil. I was in Edmonton last year and must have seen 3 dozen stacked rigs in storage driving down to Banff/Calgary.
Mnemosyne
@? Martin:
It’s hard for me to picture a disaster in California that would require the evacuation of the whole state, though, so there should always be some ability to shift people within regions.
It’s also hard for me to picture a situation where we would be better off crossing the border into Arizona rather than just staying in the high desert. A civil war, maybe?
Davebo
@charluckles:
Canada’s oil sands extraction industry is almost nonexistent at this point. WTI is at $43 and Brent $44.
You lose money fracking at that price.
NorthLeft12
FYI, there is basically only one road in and out of Fort Mac. Highway 63 runs from the north to the south right through the city. There are basically no roads to the east or west. So, you either fly in or out, or drive up or down Hwy 63. BTW Hwy 63 is basically a two lane highway, with some passing lanes, all the way south to Edmonton….about four hundred kilometres away. It is known as one of the deadliest highways in Canada due to the high number of trucks, lack of passing lanes, and the level crossings that are the only access onto this highway. The previous Conservative governments have pretty much refused to upgrade this highway due to the high cost……in dollars. Lives, not so much.
Bob In Portland
Excuse me. I must apologize to coal miners.
? Martin
@Mnemosyne:
Earthquake – Newport Inglewood. Maybe tsunami. Doesn’t need to impact the whole state, just Pendleton up to the grapevine. You’ve got 18 million people in that area. You’ll lose most of our refining capacity in either scenario. You’ll cut off half of our egress with a tsunami (including all passenger rail), and an earthquake even more due to collapsing bridges. Probably expect water supply to be disrupted, though that would be a top priority. With roads largely cut off getting food in will be a challenge, and 18 million people is too many to airlift goods in.
In the end it becomes a race – can you route around the infrastructure problems fast enough to let people stay in place? Temper that with the fact that there would be widespread damage and loss of life/injury that will necessarily take priority. And toss a level of panic on top that will cause some number of people to instinctively flee, likely making any orderly plan much harder to implement (blocking roads so that support can’t flow in, etc). Essentially we’re looking at a much larger, slower version of New Orleans/Katrina with a large enough earthquake/tsunami.
If you can’t win the race, you will need to evacuate at least some of the population. You’ll overwhelm the high desert almost immediately, just on water/waste. You’ll need to move onto larger population centers – Phoenix, San Francisco, Las Vegas. Which introduces new logistical challenges. My Costco gets so much gas traffic they get multiple trucks per day. Could you supply the high desert gas stations fast enough to support a large exodus given that most people don’t have enough range to reach those cities (and factor in that SoCal refineries and storage are likely offline since they’re all on the coast)?
There’s so many moving parts, and inevitably much of the organization that would come from SoCal would be dedicated to logistics within the mountains. Logistics outside of the mountains would need to come from a host of other places. It would need to be a national effort.
And NYC/Long Island would be worse, but with the benefit of such a disaster being less likely to happen.
sherparick
@NorthLeft12: It is hard to pin particular weather events on Human caused global warming, but the overall trend of bigger and more frequent wildfires, droughts, and sea level rise are fairly attributable to that which our conservative countrymen says does not exist. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/science/wildfires-season-global-warming.html
It is a tragic irony that this is occurring at Fort McMurray, the center of the Canadian Oil Sands industry.
pseudonymous in nc
Yeah, Fort McMurray only exists as a significant settlement because it’s the centre of Canadian tar sands extraction, and the area around it has been turned upside-down in recent years. The population has doubled over the past 15 years, but it’s been kind of transient, lots of single men working long hours, living in cheap accommodation and sending money back to wherever they came from. Few seniors, relatively few kids.
In a way it’s an easier place to evacuate than a settlement with more families and family homes.
Hillary Rettig
@PhoenixRising: plus 90% of Great Barrier Reef corals already gone due to climate change + acidification
Monkeyfister
Ft. McMurray mainly exists because it’s where the tar sands are. It’s the top of the XL Pipeline.
Sad situation at many levels, but tarsands and that crappy pipeline are going to be political non-issues for a while.
Monkeyfister
@Davebo: I see no reason to weep for anything in that comment post.
Doug R
@charluckles: @pseudonymous in nc: Wife’s nephew is working in a camp around there. They want to fly them out so the camp can house refugees.
rikyrah
That fire is terrifying.
Prayers and thoughts of safety for the residents.
PurpleGirl
Where is Langley (BC) in relation to Fort McMurray? As far as friends in Canada go, I know of one knitter/writer (Stephanie Pearl Mcphee) but she’s in Toronto. Langley is the home of Shelly Roach of Tiny Kittens, a cat/kitten rescuer who operates several kitten cams.
Thor Heyerdahl
@PurpleGirl: About 1000 miles away. Langley is in southwest British Columbia. Ft. McMurray is in northeast Alberta.
PurpleGirl
@Thor Heyerdahl: TY.
Aleta
This (based on real time measurements and weather forecast models, not climate models) shows the temperature anomaly affecting Alberta right now. You can use it to look at historical patterns and other things as well.