Canada’s wildfires, smoke became a problem for US
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This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
FORT McMURRAY, Alberta — Gertie Byrne rushed to escape a looming wildfire bearing down on her home. Again.
It was May 14, and authorities had given her two hours to throw important belongings in the car and flee Fort McMurray, her hometown. She headed to her brother’s house in Edmonton, about four and a half hours away, as a wildfire edged toward her neighborhood. Again.
“At least we could take some of our valuables,” Byrne, 65, told the Free Press days after her return. “The last time we ran for our lives, really. And we lost everything.”
The last time was the Horse River Fire in May and June of 2016, the worst wildfire in Canadian history. That blaze caused $9.9 billion Canadian in damage (about $7.23 billion U.S.) and destroyed more than 2,400 houses and buildings in and around Fort McMurray — including Byrne’s home.
Less than eight years later, wildfire was again at Fort McMurray’s doorstep.
About 2,100 miles away, Detroit resident Toyia Watts spent weeks of last summer enveloped in a murk of Canadian wildfire smoke.
“It was bad — it was so foggy and smoky in our neighborhood, and I didn’t know where it was coming from until the news broke it down,” she said.
“I didn’t know we could get that quantity of smoke coming into the Detroit area from far up in Canada.”
Watts, 69, said she has asthma, and the smoky days kept her mostly in her house. She worries about the impact on her community’s quality of life if summers like 2023 become more frequent.
“Especially for people like me with allergies, with asthma; kids playing in the fields, just people who want to walk outside,” she said. “It’s a big issue.”
Canada has a wildfire problem — research shows its wildfires are growing in intensity and area burned. Last year, it reached nightmarish proportions — and became America’s problem, too.
Canada didn’t just break its wildfire records in 2023, it obliterated them. Nearly 58,000 square miles of the nation burned — an area about the size of Illinois — in more than 6,500 wildfires coast-to-coast from April to October, according to revised numbers from the Canadian Forest Service.
That more than doubled Canada’s previous wildfire record and was more than seven times the nation’s historical average. The smoke from those fires caused unhealthy air quality in American cities in the Northeast, Midwest and Plains throughout the spring and summer of 2023.
Something has changed in Alberta, Byrne said.
“I’ve been here 44 years,” she said. “If we saw a fire on the side of the highway, that was no big deal. We’d always see fires here, but nothing as big as these. We never lived in smoke — last summer it was so smoky here, it was ungodly.”
What caused Canada to burn last summer? Is it going to happen more, making smoke-choked summers the new normal there and in the U.S.? Can anything be done about it? The Detroit Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, with support from the Pulitzer Center this spring traveled across Canada, from its Atlantic to its Pacific coasts, venturing into its seemingly endless forests, to try to help answer those questions.
A changed forest collides with a changed climate
Calling…
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