Known as the Great Fire, it burned nearly 1,700 square kilometers of the area—including the town of Haileybury. It killed 43 people and caused millions of dollars in property damage in 18 townships. A newspaper referred to it as the "worst disaster that had ever overtaken northern Ontario."
It was not.
The wildfires back then were as fierce, deadly and eerily similar to the ones we have today. And we have yet to learn to live with them.
The Saguenay and Ottawa Valley fires in 1870 could have been just as deadly when they forced the evacuations of several thousand people. The capital city would have burned down that summer had it not been for a quick-thinking engineer who ordered the gates of the St. Louis dam on the Rideau Canal to be breached so that it would flood city streets.
In 1881, the Michigan's Thumb fires burned 1,480 barns, 1,521 houses and 51 schools, while killing 283 people and injuring many others. Smoke from those fires colored the sky over Toronto.
Each summer and fall, it seemed, ended badly somewhere.
Déjà vu
The similarities between the fires now and then are uncanny, as described in my book Dark Days At Noon: The Future of Fire. The ignition of fires between 1870 and 1922 was fuelled by higher temperatures, drier forests and the kind of elevated lightning activity that we are experiencing today.
Much of the warming back then can be attributed to the end of the little ice age (1300 to 1850) that dramatically cooled parts of the world, and the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The other thing that hasn't changed much is public policy. The Porcupine fire in 1911 as Canada's version of the Big Burn, a complex of fires that swept through the northern Rockies of the United States in 1910 and resulted in sweeping policy changes.
Following the Big Burn, the U.S. passed the Weeks Act that authorized the government to purchase up to 30 million hectares of land to protect watersheds from development and wildfire. This mandated the U.S. Forest Service to work with state fire bureaus, which were happy to co-operate because it came with funding they could not otherwise afford.
In contrast, Canadian politicians failed to do what was necessary to prevent future fires. The government, which owned many of the railroad companies, blamed Indigenous people for many fires. Better legislation and fire management strategies were still not in place five years after the Porcupine fire when the Matheson fire took the lives of 223 people. Nor were they there in 1922, when the Great Fire devastated Haileybury.
Canada had a chance to replicate what the U.S. Forest Service was doing, but failed to as funding for fire research and management was badly decimated by budget cuts and the off-loading of responsibilities to the provinces in the 1930s.
Even today, provinces like Alberta have cut wildfire budgets to save money, only to pay the price when wildfires like the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which forced the evacuation of 88,000 people.
Managing future fires
The fact that fire is still entering towns like Lytton and Fort McMurray without adequate warning suggests we have yet to learn to live with the fires that we have stoked by burning fossil fuels, draining wetlands and suppressing natural fires that would have otherwise produced more resilient forests.
The title of my book, "Dark Days at Noon," harkens back to 1780 when smoke from distant fires blocked out so much sunlight that people from all over New England thought the end of the world was at hand. The end of the world is not at hand, but there will be many more dark days at noon if we do not learn to live with fire.
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Despite its long history of wildfires, Canada still doesn't know how to live with them (2022, October 24)
retrieved 24 October 2022
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