New Yorkers join in fighting blazes in Canada's worst wildfire season in history

This summer, dozens of firefighters from New York State have deployed to Canada to help fight the country's worse wildfire season in history, under a mutual aid agreement between U.S. member states and Canadian provinces.

State Forest Ranger Rob Praczkajlo, normally posted to the High Peaks Wilderness area in upstate New York, was among them, recently returned from a 14-day rotation north of Maniwaki, Quebec.

The spruce firs there grow 80 feet high and the wood was so dry, with around 12% moisture content, “it was almost like having 2-by-4s out in the woods ready to burn,” he said Thursday. The forest was so dense that ground travel over any distance was nearly impossible. When firefighters traveled by helicopter they saw smoke columns all around them. “There were fires raging basically as far as the eye can see,” he said. 

There was too much growth on the ground to use hand tools to cut or scrape a fire line, so the firefighters worked mostly with pumps and hose.

Three of the four fires they fought had not been staffed since they started in early June, he said, and one had grown to 100,000 acres. “You pick and choose the places where you can attack it and hopefully stop it from growing,” he said. 

The fire had a rhythm: “In the morning and at night, the fire is slowly progressing, down on the ground, burning through the underbrush. Then every afternoon, from 12 to 5, 6, 7, it climbs up into the trees, literally just runs across the treetops, grows very rapidly, sometimes a kilometer in an hour.” 

One day the fire made a big run, “spotting,” or throwing firebrands out hundreds of yards in front of the main fire. The firefighters stopped those with the help of huge helicopter-borne buckets of water called Bambi buckets, Praczkajlo said.

One day they had to be evacuated by helicopter, when, at 2 p.m. in the 90-degree heat, “the fire behavior just exploded.” 

The Canadians, Praczkajlo said, were “triaging … they’re putting their resources where they’re best protecting.” In the coming weeks, he said, “it’s going to take a change in the weather to help assist them to gain control.” 

As climate change dries the undergrowth in Canada’s vast old-growth forests, They are becoming making them more susceptible to lighting strikes and other fire sources, said John Gradek, a McGill University lecturer. Canadians may have to adopt a more active approach to forest management, he said, than the one they currently use.

"The decision has been made to basically let ([the fires] remain out of control," mostly in regions where there is no immediate threat to settlements and infrastructures, he said.

For the near future, Gradek said, “Those fires will burn, and will burn for a significant amount of time, and that means smoke drifting."

Gradek said he believes Canadians may have to adopt a more resource-intensive, militaristic approach to firefighting than many European nations have, in which firefighters would "attack quickly and attack in waves, [deploying] significant resources at the start of a fire … If there’s a small brush fire and you notice the smoke early on, the water bombers are immediately sent into the air and the fires are extinguished before they have a chance to spread.”

Changes to that approach, however, take money, resources and time.

On Thursday, the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre reported 505 active wildfires in provinces from the west to east coast; to date, about, 3,000 fires have burned more than 20 million acres of boreal forests, making this year “the worst wildfire season Canada has ever had,” said. “We’ve never been here before.”

This year there have been 3,064 fires, with more than 20 million acres burned.

Wildfire season starts in May and peaks in July or August. It could take weeks or months to extinguish the fires that are the source of the smoke rolling down into the U.S., Gradek said. 

The reasons are many, including the remoteness of the fires, equipment and firefighting strategy, he said, but the primary challenge may be the fires’ unprecedented breadth: typically, provinces coordinate firefighting resources to focus where they’re needed, but this year they are needed everywhere. 

About 3,500 Canadian firefighters are working 10-day rotations, aided by international crews from the U.S., Europe and as far away as Costa Rica and South Korea. It takes days to train the newcomers.

Logistics are difficult because much of the firefighting is miles from cities or infrastructure; food, shelter, equipment and firefighters have to be hauled by helicopter or along primitive logging roads, and bringing in some of the most important equipment, like backhoes and bulldozers used to make fire breaks, is a “major challenge.” 

Canada’s fleet of water bombers, fixed-wing aircraft that scoop and drop more than a thousand gallons of water, numbers about 75, with about 25 nearing the end of their useful lives, Gradek said; ideally, the fleet would number at least 100, he said. 

By now, with some fires close to the size of Rhode Island, even a radical increase in resources would probably be insufficient to extinguish them all, Gradek said. According to the Fire Centre, 253 fires were burning out of control Thursday, and “the decision has been made to basically let [them] remain out of control,” mostly in regions where there’s no immediate threat to settlements and infrastructure, Gradek said.”