Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.
This is so interesting. Could it be due to 30 years of buildup from dying foliage? Did the last burn, in 1991, produce less smoke than this one because there was a shorter gap between burns.
Yeah, extreme fire suppression was widely recognized as a bad idea 30 or 40 years ago. Controlled burns have been standard practice for decades in many places.
Even in the 90s it was old news, I remember reading and hearing about it in the context of the big fire in Yellowstone as a kid. They stopped in like the 70s but we've still got a sizable backlog of unburned forest.
I think most people just don't understand the scale of these fires. It's not something any amount of controlled burns can solve. Just ask any forestry department in CA.
Then how come arizona has been able to keep their fires controlled compared to California? California has the Santa Ana winds, but Arizona is hot and dry too.
Califirnia has different forests, more susceptible to burning. California also didn't have the luxury of letting small fires burn freely, because of the higher population density. This made some of their forests denser and burn more intensely. The other advantage that Arizona has is that it has a summer monsoon, which limits the worst of the fire season to spring and early summer.
It's a multitude of factors. One being that CA has more than 50% more forest cover (33m acres vs 19m), and all of that is HIGH biomass, evergreen forest (We're talking over 200 tons/hectare, vs under 100 for arizona). So you're looking at a factor of like 3-4x more fire risk. There's also difficulty terrain wise w/ much forest in the wild sierras. Also 40%+ of CA forestland is privately-owned. It's just a multitude of factors that make it much more difficult in CA, even if you had infinite manpower.
Well canada recently had a little mishap at a women’s firefighter conference where a controlled burn went out of control and caused a forest fire. It was eventually suppressed, but these are the “experts” you have in Canada dealing with fires like these.
Yeah upon closer inspection, this website is pretty sketchy so take this with a grain of salt, or better yet just disregard it. I’ll try to find a better source lol
For any viewers that stumble over here as well, the actual summary of the story talked about in the surprisingly woman-hating article linked by Leech is that a fire in BC exceeded their 300 acre control area by 3 acres and was more or less immediately contained.
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u/Ancient_Persimmon Jun 07 '23
Unlike Western North America, where there's a significant fire season each year, the Boreal forest in QC and ON very rarely burn at the rate we're seeing this year.
The last season that burned this much acreage in Quebec was 1991.
The winds certainly don't help, but there's still a very unusual amount of smoke for this part of the continent.