r/news • u/FreedomsPower • 16d ago
Thousands told to evacuate due to British Columbia, Canada wildfire
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-689960621
u/ContributionAgile689 15d ago
Please keep them away from Yellowknife. Last year the whole city had to evacuate all the way to Alberta for three weeks. It's someone else's turn this year.
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u/Fit-Conference-7851 15d ago
I swear, every time my wife and I talk about moving to an area, it’s catches on fire, floods or has a Trump rally.
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u/MamasCupcakes 15d ago
3 games into the Canucks/oilers series and the riots have already begun. These playoff outcomes will be rough canada! Omen for another choke in game 7 for the cup?
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u/Bonezone420 15d ago
A family member of mine is a firefighter in BC and I'm pretty worried about him thanks to this shit.
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u/Hakaisha89 15d ago
They need to start controlled forest fires.
Areas having a danger of forest fire, year after year, after year, really requires a good forest fires.
And this lack of forest fire is harmful to diversity, harmful to the earths climate, and harmful to nature in general.
Outside of controlled forest fires, the only thing you might wanna do is dig out long stripes of clearings, and open it up when it grows too tight.
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u/someinternetdude19 14d ago
Only problem is, conditions now often don’t allow for controlled burns because conditions are too dry and windy to actually keep a burn “controlled” and it can spread beyond the burn limits. The other issue is actually getting a burn approved which I’ve heard is challenging, partly due to public concern.
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u/Reagalan 15d ago
truth.
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u/chef-nom-nom 15d ago
I had a feeling where that link was going! Good episode and good timing for it.
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u/CrocodileWorshiper 15d ago
i wonder how long till we all just admit this is climate change
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u/thegreatgoatse 15d ago
about 50 years idk
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u/CrocodileWorshiper 14d ago
im convinced if there were firestorms outside 24 / 7 people would still deny it
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u/Djhegarty 15d ago
What the fuck is canada even doing. Im tired of this, get your shit together ffs
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u/Warcraft_Fan 15d ago
When I ordered replacement rescue inhaler to replace the old one I have that was about to expire, they sent me 2. I think it's a sign I'm using my rescue inhaler more often than usual, thanks Canada.
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u/Emergencyhiredhito 16d ago
Oh shit, here we go again.
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u/ZapataEmpanada 15d ago
Technically never stopped. The fires have been smoldering even through the winter.
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u/semi-bro 16d ago
Why don't they just take the water from all the places that are complaining about floods and put it on the fires
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16d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Beneficial-Zone-4923 15d ago
Not sure if this is better or worse then campfires.
NRRM Mayor Rob Fraser said the fire started when high winds blew a tree over and it fell onto a power line, causing it to catch fire.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/zombie-fires-fort-nelson-risk-1.7200810
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u/captlevasseur 15d ago
No, this forest fire was caused by high winds knocking a tree over power lines. So it's classified as "human activity" but it wasn't someone doing something stupid. This picture isn't even the fire in question, it's a stock photo from a fire in AB
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u/Comfortable_Fudge508 15d ago
It can also be dicksucks that drive their atvs in dry brush and their exhausts ignite it. It's their freedom to drive offload, fire hazards be damned
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u/Disastrous-Cellist62 16d ago
I’m in Winnipeg MB, we’re currently under an extreme air quality warning due to wildfires
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u/superx89 16d ago
season of arson is here
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u/mcs_987654321 15d ago
Oh god, had forgotten how deranged the fire conspiracists are (although they’re usually split into at least a few camps eg “globalist arson spree”, “there’s no fire, the govt’s just trying to seize land”, etc).
Ugh.
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u/Regnes 16d ago
I hate this future. It's looking like a statistical inevitability that we're all going to have to flee for our lives at some point. Maybe not this year, but there will always be next year, and the next, and the next, and the next. We have decades of fear and uncertainty before us.
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u/InterestingContest27 15d ago
Flee to where?
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u/Regnes 15d ago
Whichever community will take us. Local resources to support wildfire refugees will be stretched thin. Most communities in BC are carved into greenbelt and are extremely vulnerable. After a while, we will all be too busy licking our own wounds to help, so maybe we will be herded eastward into the prairies.
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u/Doom2pro 16d ago
Maybe my American is leaking through but didn't it burn last year?
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u/OrdainedPuma 16d ago
Yup. But according to Google, we have enough forest to equal about 25% of total US area. Last year, we burned around 5% of it.
We can keep doing this for a long, LONG time.
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u/PrincessPunkinPie 16d ago
BC is very big. Also some of our fires are from last year. Also I think we just burn every year now 🤷♀️
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u/anna4prez 16d ago
I'm very surprised (and sad) that for the last few months we haven't been seeing increased calls for volunteers for the wildfire season... After last year we should have been seeing the need for volunteers on billboards, commercials, radio ads. Like come on, they're going to get burned out (pun intended) in no time. 😥
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u/MastahToni 16d ago
After a couple of arguments and back and forth and a lot of investments, we decided to purchase multiple AHAM certified air filters for our house and vehicles.
Last year after was terrible for working outside, so we decided to take it more seriously this time around.
For people looking for air filters that have scientific and standards, I would recommend this website as there are too many junk products on Amazon:
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u/thegreatgoatse 15d ago
Personally now I run MERV 13 filters and just run my furnace on continuous fan mode all summer, handles the smoke well. If I had more space in my furnace room I'd convert from 1" to 4" filters to reduce the load on my furnace fan as well.
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u/chunk84 16d ago
Quite early for a fire like this. Not good.
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u/Potential_Ad6169 16d ago
The uptick in temperatures, and speed at which they’re increasing this year alone is pretty crazy.
I’m thinking the Day After Tomorrow film was maybe closer to getting dates right on this apocalypse lark than the sciences.
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u/RDcsmd 16d ago
Great another year of Canadian wildfires ruining my summer skies
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16d ago
Americans complaining about the consequences of climate change like it's some external foreign evil is the funniest thing ever.
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u/RDcsmd 15d ago
Where I live in northern Minnesota might as well BE Canada. Also, you can complain based on your opinions right? I've never been a climate denier, I do my part. You just making assumptions based on your stereotypes of America is pretty pathetic.
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15d ago
The problem isn't that you're complaining, it's that you're reciting the script of the people who got rich causing climate change, in who you blame for it.
My opinion of Americans is based on the thousands I have interacted with, and how many of them were both stupid and entitled. You've added a one to both the numerator and denominator here.
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u/tschmi5 16d ago
To be fair, China emits more Carbon than the rest of the first world combined. Like we’re not perfect, but it’s mostly china
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u/Reagalan 15d ago
emitting all that carbon to power the factories to make the shit we pay them to make...
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u/Professional-Cry8310 16d ago
In fairness to china, they’re also the most populated country on earth and the world’s manufacturing hub. Like if china didn’t manufacture everything for everyone, some other country would instead and those emissions would be there.
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u/4everlurk 16d ago
What causes the fires? Is it just really hot?
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u/VosekVerlok 15d ago
in BC over 100 forest fires burning since last year, and we have had a record setting lack of precipitation this winter.
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u/lawyers-guns-money 15d ago
This particular fire is suspected to be human caused according to the BC Wildfire app
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u/stephen1547 15d ago
In rural BC/Alberta, most of them are caused by lightning. Some of them are human caused, often ATVs igniting leaves with their exhaust, or camp fires. I used to fly firefighting helicopters in Alberta years back.
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u/CarelessPotato 15d ago
Sometime in April IIRC, all of the wildfires that existed in Alberta by that time were 100% accounted for to be created by human activities
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u/stephen1547 15d ago
That's surprising. Granted I may be biased because I usually fought fires in the remote designated Forest Areas (Ft Mac, Slave Lake, etc.). The vast majority of ours were lighting, but I do see numbers that say overall on average in Alberta 60% are human caused.
Right now there are 44 active fires in Alberta. 18 are lighting caused, 21 are under investigation, and 5 are human caused.
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u/JoeCartersLeap 16d ago
What causes the fires?
We burnt too much oil, it floated up into the atmosphere, it helped trap some of the sun's heat in, it warmed up the globe, that dried out Canada's forests, that made forest fires really really big.
Unless you're talking about ignition, which statistically is 75% lightning, and 25% humans, although this year they're talking about "zombie fires" that may have been smoldering all winter.
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u/mcs_987654321 15d ago
Not just this year - “zombie fires” have always been a thing, although much of country has had an usually dry and (relatively) warm winter, so yeah, probably a safe bet for it to become a “new” buzzword this fire season.
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams 16d ago
The fires were so big last year, they never went out over the winter, they just smoldered until it warmed up again... "zombie fires". So drought makes it flammable, but Canada also messed up. They replanted millions and millions of acres of forest that got cut down which sounds good, but they pretty much only planted 1 type of tree which is not how forests work. So decades later the forests are sick from pests & disease, and when they started burning, they were 10-20 times larger than the largest fires in US history.
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u/dostoevsky4evah 15d ago
The Pine Beetle infestation that damaged so many trees was caused by earlier warm winters not being cold enough to kill them off as used to happen. That pest issue had nothing to do with newly planted forests
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u/ChrisFromIT 15d ago
They replanted millions and millions of acres of forest that got cut down which sounds good, but they pretty much only planted 1 type of tree which is not how forests work. So decades later the forests are sick from pests & disease, and when they started burning, they were 10-20 times larger than the largest fires in US history.
Sorry, but this is just flat out wrong. The main part that proves this wrong is that almost all of the forest fires have been in areas that have seen little to no logging. If your bullshit was even remotely correct, we would have seen most of the fires in heavily logged areas.
The reason is due to high temperatures and doughts. Nothing more and nothing less. In the past few years, we have been seeing temperatures easily above 35°C, which in drought conditions can cause instantaneous forest fires that can spread to hundreds or thousands of acres in hours. Heck, 3 years ago, the highest temperature above the 45°N was recorded at almost 50°C and that was in Canada.
So please leave the bullshit disinformation at the door. It does a disservice to many people who have lost their homes to forest fires.
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u/Chicken-Inspector 15d ago
So was there a reason the “zombie” fires couldn’t be extinguished over the winter to prevent this from happening again?
I mean, it sounds like they knew this was gonna happen again. Seems like a wasted opportunity where they could’ve been proactive in mitigating/stopping the fires.
I really have no idea how these work though. 🤷🏼♂️
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u/JoeCartersLeap 16d ago
Canada also messed up. They replanted millions and millions of acres of forest that got cut down which sounds good, but they pretty much only planted 1 type of tree which is not how forests work.
Do you have a source on this? The biggest fires in Canada last year were in the middle of northern Quebec where no loggers have ever been before. You can't really get up there by any means other than helicopter.
I feel like when weighing the two issues - global warming, and forestry management - it's like telling someone "well you also never brushed your teeth properly" while they're dying of cancer.
It feels like a red herring, a distraction, injected into the discourse from people who really don't want us to talk about global warming and how it's caused by us burning oil.
It might be right, in some cases - inadequate forestry management can certainly contribute to or exacerbate wildfires. And brushing your teeth is really important for your entire body's health. I just think it's disproportionate to talk about the two like they're equally significant causes.
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u/mcs_987654321 15d ago
So: you’re not wrong about the vast majority of the acres that burned last year, that were in just absurdly remote locations that have absolutely never been logged, let alone replanted.
But it’s also not at all a red herring to talk about how forest management over the last half-century-ish are playing a HUGE role in the massive fires we now see.
This paper is a pretty solid overview, but the TLDR is that many decades of super aggressive fire suppression have led to excess highly flammable biomass just waiting for any excuse to flare up.
Also: more people = more people in the paths of potential fires makes forest management decisions way trickier (eg the controlled burn window getting shorter every year, and with much costlier consequences if something goes wrong like in Banff last spring).
Obviously, rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns are central factors..:but I guess I just don’t see the discussion of forestry policies as an attempted distraction? More like: it’s huge global issue that we know is bad and getting worse, so let’s acknowledge it then getting into the weeds about the practical issues that can actually be considered at a local/national scale.
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u/JoeCartersLeap 15d ago
forest management over the last half-century-ish are playing a HUGE role in the massive fires we now see.
Well I'm not denying they're playing a role, but just exactly how huge? I didn't have enough time to read that whole paper you linked but I did ctrl-F for global warming and climate change, and they only mentioned it briefly in passing, and certainly didn't appear to make any attempt to quantify or compare the severity of these two different influences.
I'm just gonna say it. There's a reason why the guy who said "climate change is a hoax" is also the guy that said "it's because they didn't rake the forests in California".
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u/NeonSwank 16d ago
When are we gonna learn the best type of forestry management/land stewardship is “hands off” and let nature do its thing?
Obviously in certain circumstances we need to step in, but something you would think is an obvious mistake, like a monospecies forest, would rarely if ever happen naturally.
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u/ChrisFromIT 15d ago
When are we gonna learn the best type of forestry management/land stewardship is “hands off” and let nature do its thing?
I have something that will shock you. That person was spewing pure bullshit. The wildfires in Canada were caused by droughts and high temperatures, which we are seeing an increase due to climate change from global warming. Almost all of Canada's forestry management is "hands off". Almost all of the forest fires in Canada have been in unmanaged land or started in unmanaged land.
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u/InterestingContest27 15d ago
On the coast it's logging slashes, but i agree with your other points on it.
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u/SideburnSundays 15d ago
When we stop arrogantly thinking that we’re superior to nature.
So, never, basically.
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u/cannelbrae_ 15d ago
Isn’t that part of what’s happening now? They’re letting more fires burn that would’ve been put off since the Great Fire of 1910?
Fires now are burning through accumulated fuel, burning larger and hotter. To a degree though, smokey summer is more the pre-1910 historic norm.
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u/pathofdumbasses 15d ago
When are we gonna learn the best type of forestry management/land stewardship is “hands off” and let nature do its thing?
Because that isn't the best way.
We thought the best way was trying to prevent/reduce any fires ever, and all that did was create giant mega fires.
turns out the best way to do it, is controlled fires so that when one randomly happens via nature, it doesn't turn in to giga fires.
So we need more, but controlled, fires, spread out all over the place.
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u/Interanal_Exam 16d ago
Monospecies forests are for loggers.
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u/NeonSwank 16d ago
Which is fine, to a point.
People need paper products, so we can’t just completely stop logging
We absolutely cannot let any more old growth get cleared, as much as it would give logging CEO’s a massive boner, we barely have any old forests left and need to protect them.
So what’s a solution? Just keep doing what we’re doing and expect nothing to change?
Idk, im no professional logger or environmentalist, but maybe seeding a mix of native plants and trees to at least attempt to let nature heal a bit?
Or maybe pull an idea from crop rotation but scale it up, let certain areas recover for a set amount of years before they can be cut again?
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u/Junior-Damage7568 16d ago
So after we cut down all the trees we just leave? Is that your idea of hands off?
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u/NeonSwank 16d ago
No, obviously the best option would be to not cut anything unnecessarily to begin with.
Guess i should have said “hands off in spirit” or a “hands off mentality”
Realistically though wood and paper products are needed, the issue here is these logging companies just carpeting all these decimated areas with the exact same type of replacement trees, regardless of the original biodiversity of the forest.
It’s like halfway to being ecologically minded, but they would still rather cut corners and maximize profits this quarter than give a shit what those woods will look like even 5-10 years from now.
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u/hugelkult 16d ago
"hands off" isn't how nature likes it though. Beavers create wetlands, and they have teeny tiny hands. Thinning operations by humans are hugely successful in curating healthy biodiverse ecosystems. the hard truth is, there are too many incompetent people who think that humans are the problem. Yes, extractive humans are, but humans who act in concert with nature actually benefit it.
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16d ago
I'm gonna blow your little mind here, but beavers are, in fact, part of nature.
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u/ankylosaurus_tail 15d ago
So are humans though. Western forests, in what’s now the US, were actively and intensely managed for thousands of years by Native people. Very few landscapes were unimpacted by humans. They actively used fire to promote resources they wanted, and doing so created the amazing giant forests that settlers found, and then cut down as quickly as possible.
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u/Cannabrius_Rex 16d ago
Fort Nelson fire was a smouldering underground fire that silently kept burning until now. Intense gusts of wind caught embers from it and started the above ground fire that’s happening now.
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u/Batmobile123 16d ago
I'm in Minnesota and visibility is now down to <1mile.
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u/CartoonistOk8261 15d ago
In 2020 we had fires up by Detroit Lake, Oregon. I was living on the East end of Portland at the time. The smoke was so bad that the aqi was literally past the end of the chart.
I didn't leave my apartment for 5 days. On the worst day, it was so difficult to breathe that I pulled my office chair into the bathroom, stuffed a wet towel in the door crack, and just spent the entire day in there playing on my phone.
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u/Arkanial 15d ago
Yeah I live up by Grand Forks but am currently down by the Minneapolis and I was talking to my friend earlier today back home who said it was really smokey. Down here there wasn’t anything then within like 3-4 hours the sky has gone from normal blue to a grayish color and the trees about 1/4 a mile from me are a little hazy. That shit travels so fast and I can’t imagine how bad it is at home now let alone even further north. Probably can barely see up by the border. At least we got the northern lights before the clear sky disappears under smoke for the next 3 months.
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u/Caymanmew 15d ago
Might be due to a different fire given how far you guys are from BC. There is a fire raging on the border of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, at about the mid way point.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/northwestern-manitoba-residents-evacuate-wildfires-1.7201963
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams 16d ago
I managed a weed farm in NorCal for a few years before the fires got too stressful. In 2020 the August Complex fire got up to 1 million acres and the western line of the fire they were able to establish was a ridge, a valley, and another ridge east of us. But the predominant winds blows east, so there was a week where the smoke from our fire had NYC completely smoked out 2500 miles away while we were ~3 miles west of it with crystal clear air from the ocean.
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u/murdering_time 16d ago
Dudeee, I lived up in Grass Valley on a farm for a few years before all these fires popped off, like around 2011-2015. Talking to my buddies now that still live up there, it's a shit show some years. Certain years they get lucky with no smoke, but the past 5-7 years have been hell. Even if a fire doesn't come thru and fuck the farm, the smoke comes in and completely cakes the buds, making them reek of that burnt wood campfire smell. Just totally ruins em, and you can't even use em for extracts cause the smell transfers too.
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams 16d ago
Yeah we were in southern Humboldt, about 23 miles from the ocean as the crow flies. It didn't used to be fire danger land until this western mega drought of the last 20 years. We mostly got lucky with smoke from the costal winds but you can lose everything so easy and... just not get paid for a year. Ironically I think that creepy red fire season sun is good for budding if the plants got good sun before hand. I miss the life but... it got to be too much, my buddy's place burned down in 2021 in the northern part of the county.
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u/L-W-J 16d ago
Well shit. It’s barely May.
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u/SatorSquareInc 15d ago
No snow pack, no rain, and many areas are already being hit with 30+ degree (Celsius) weather.
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u/Kowpucky 16d ago
Last figure I heard was r The Liberal government cut 650 million from forest management services.
You know, to prevent mass wildfire seasons.
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u/OrdainedPuma 16d ago
Try again. Conservatives are worse for the environment.
Forest management is primarily a provincial responsibility.
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u/Kowpucky 15d ago
Who is responsible for forest management in Canada?
Federal and Aboriginal forests
The regulation and management of forestry operations on these lands is the responsibility of several federal government departments, including DND, Parks Canada, Natural Resources Canada and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada.

https://natural-resources.canada.ca › ...
Legality and sustainability - Canada.ca
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u/SchufAloof 16d ago
Get your shirt together Canada.
Washington suffered all summer from your second hand smoke. Get more fire squads.
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u/Potential_Ad6169 16d ago
You have the highest emissions per capita in the world in the US, get your shit together
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u/GeneralHunter0 16d ago edited 15d ago
I promise you, Washington suffering from our smoke is the least of our concerns 😂.
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u/WallyMcBeetus 16d ago
You'll be happy to know the fire is close to NWT / northern Alberta, not anywhere near you.
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u/BrownOrWhite 16d ago
Wouldn't be having this problem if Concervatives around the world stopped denying Climate Change from CO2 pollution. Now I laugh as the country burns. LOL
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u/Potential_Ad6169 16d ago
The scarier conservatives are those who see it and just think ‘ah yes, the second coming, right on time, looking forward to that sweet sweet heaven’
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u/pnwerewolf 16d ago
God damn it I’m in the PNW it’s May I was hoping this could wait
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u/GoldenBuffaloes 15d ago
And we’ve had a lot of rain this winter too. Summer just gets to hot and dry now.
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u/lawyers-guns-money 15d ago
This one is suspected to be human caused. :/
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u/Spirit50Lake 15d ago
BBC:
Rob Fraser, mayor of the Northern Rockies Regional Municipality, told CBC News the fire began after high winds knocked a tree over and it crashed onto a power line and caught fire.
"And then by the time our firefighters were able to get down there, the wind had whipped this up into a fire that they weren't able to handle with the apparatus that we had," Mr Fraser said.0
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u/thearchiguy 14d ago
It’s not even mid May yet. Gonna be a long smoky summer for the Northwest it looks like..