An American firefighter’s honest letter to Canada
What I wouldn’t give to turn back the clock 40 years — to listen more closely to the harbinger wildfires and the future they foretold of catastrophes to come during my tenure as a firefighter in the United States.
Today, smoke rolling into the US from massive wildfires in provinces to the north makes me think this is Canada’s year to listen to its fires and pivot the way we should have.
One of our biggest errors: We failed to align building and infrastructure development with fire protection responsibilities.
In the US, most authority for this development rests with our local government entities, while the vast majority of wildland acres are protected by state and federal firefighting organizations.
This means agencies creating the wildland-urban interface or WUI — where human settlements meet the natural environment — are not ultimately responsible for protecting it. That’s a problem.
Let me give you an example. By my fifth year in firefighting, I’d seen plenty of wildfires and structure fires, and wildfires threatening structures. But I hadn’t yet seen anything like the Morse fire in Pebble Beach, California.
On the night of May 31, 1987, all hands were called. We responded at midnight from 100 miles away as the blaze consumed multimillion-dollar homes scattered throughout the Del Monte Forest — a coastal paradise thought safe under its daily blanket of fog.
What I wouldn’t give to turn back the clock 40 years — to listen more closely to the harbinger wildfires and the future they foretold of catastrophes to come during my tenure as a firefighter in the United States. Today, smoke rolling into the US from massive wildfires in provinces to the north makes me think this…