Ft. McMurray 2 - Electric Boogaloo: Massive Peat Fires That Will Burn All Summer Long
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As is true south of the border, Canada’s wildfires are getting bigger, and the annual wildfire season is growing longer. In the past week, the blaze firefighters have nicknamed “the beast” has displaced more than 88,000, hit the country’s oil production, and grown steadily in size. Ignited by an unknown cause nine miles west of Fort McMurray, within a week it morphed into a 565,000-acre leviathan—20 percent larger than the city of Los Angeles—jumping highways and four rivers in the process and triggering a mandatory mass evacuation as crews met the flames in a series of pitched battles. The urban skirmishes couldn’t prevent the loss of more than 2,400 structures. The damage was a shock in an era of modern detection and suppression techniques. It approached the oil sands production areas, at one point reaching within 20 miles of a bitumen processing facility’s highly combustible chemicals. Estimates of the damage are higher than 9 billion Canadian dollars, on pace to be the costliest natural disaster in the country’s history. Though 90 percent of Fort McMurray was saved, its 61,000 residents are blanketed with uncertainty as officials block their return until the city is deemed safe.
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In wildfire fighting, fire crews rely on natural and human-made barriers—rivers, highways, lakes, mountain ridges—to help temper an errant fire. Peat, or muskeg, a swampy ground cover, helps slow the spread of a blaze, starving it of fuel. In the northern sections of Alberta where the fire raged, the forests are pockmarked with bogs rife with organic matter—stored carbon. “Sixty percent of the boreal in the region is covered by peat,” says Waddington. Sphagnum, a natural fire retardant, grows plentifully in these bogs—with the right levels of moisture. But dry weather turned peat from a fire barrier to a global-warming catalyst.
Peat fires are messy fires. They burn significantly longer, are harder to extinguish, and release significantly higher amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases contribute to the climate conditions that ripened Alberta’s boreal forest for the beast, creating a positive feedback loop.
The fires also burn deep. After a wildfire tore through Slave Lake, displacing the town’s 7,000 residents and destroying 374 structures, Waddington’s research team discovered the fire reached depths of five feet. When peat makes contact with a fire, it combusts at a temperature lower than flame but still smolders. Because the peat is porous, oxygen fuels the flame and carries it beneath the surface, where it becomes elusive. These deeper burns mean more legacy carbon accumulated over centuries is instantly released. Only a few days after the Fort McMurray fire started, crews suspected it had burrowed underground while it surged forward; ground cover with little moisture provided an easy entry point for the flames. Traveling undetected for miles and immune to the changing seasons above it, the flame reemerges far from the original fire. This becomes a threat: Fire crews digging perimeter lines have been caught by a flare-up from underground.
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http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/05/13/fort-mcmurray-fires?cmpid=pt-tw
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It's sad but was bound to happen. I wonder how things are going with the peat burns in Siberia. Probably still burning as well.
Thanks for the article.
