On Aug. 6, the Vancouver Fire Department was on scene of a condo fire in the Dunbar neighbourhood, with pumpers and ladders and “deluge guns,” but the fire was so intense that resources from neighbouring cities had to be called in.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
John Vaillant’s latest book is Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast.
“The trees were on fire,” said one witness. “Lawns were on fire,” said another. “Roofs were on fire,” said a third. “There weren’t enough firefighters.” “It made its own wind.” “You could feel the heat from blocks away.”
These sound like witness quotes from the recent terrible blaze in Jasper, Alta., or from Halifax last year, or Lytton, B.C., in 2021, or Fort McMurray in 2016, or Slave Lake in 2011.
But they’re not. These quotes are from Vancouver, last Tuesday, just five kilometres from my house.
Around dinnertime on Aug. 6, in the sleepy west side neighbourhood of Dunbar, a half-built six-storey wooden condo caught on fire. It started small, but it got big – fast. Witnesses heard “bangs” and “explosions.” Anyone who saw the raging, hundred-foot flames at the corner of West 41st and Collingwood could have reasonably thought a gas station was burning. You could see the plume – black as a refinery fire – clear across English Bay.
The Vancouver Fire Department was on scene with pumpers and ladders and “deluge guns,” but the fire was so intense that resources from neighbouring cities had to be called in. Embers the size of hand grenades were landing across the neighbourhood, igniting other houses.
A lot of movies are filmed in Vancouver, and on this idyllic West Coast evening, it looked like something out of the Marvel cinematic universe. Bystanders and firefighters screamed as a 30-metre, 50-tonne construction crane engulfed in flames toppled over in terrible, cinematic slow-mo across a major crosstown thoroughfare. On its way down, it took out power lines and trolley wires, and crushed the house across the street, trapping an occupant. It is a miracle no one was killed. These secondary events are called “cascade effects,” an important term to know in the context of 21st-century fire – and of fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown in general.
What started as a single condo fire tied up most of the available resources across the city. Embers were landing blocks away in the 900-hectare Pacific Spirit Park, where they had to be chased down and extinguished by additional personnel. It’s dry here in August; just imagine if one of those had gotten away.
Nine nearby homes caught fire, and two were destroyed. Several firefighters were injured. So many fires were igniting that local teenagers were put in charge of their own fire hose.
And these weren’t even the only fires in Vancouver that night. On the east side of town, a wooden apartment building with a raft of safety violations also ignited. It also escalated quickly, morphing into a three-alarm fire involving 50 firefighters.
Reflecting on the west side fire, Vancouver Fire Chief Karen Fry said, “We are very fortunate we did not lose that whole block, or even more … ”
It’s the “even more” that worries me. There is an elephant in our living room, or, I should say, our city. Its name is Conflagration.
“Conflagration” is a semi-technical term meaning “multiple fires burning together.” It’s how cities burn down. Back in May, I spent an hour discussing this grave possibility with Global News BC. I worried that some viewers might find such speculation alarmist, but it’s not. Most Vancouverites, including my own neighbours, have no idea how lucky we were last week.
While researching Fire Weather, I interviewed a lot of people who’ve seen their towns and cities burn. There are common themes: no one thinks it’s going to happen to them, and no one can believe how fast it happens once it does. Had the wind been 10 knots stronger (easily achieved on a warm summer evening on Vancouver’s breezy west side), or had the temperature been five degrees hotter (easily achieved in Vancouver’s new heat dome-prone climate), we might have been reading some very different headlines last week.
Folks, we’ve had our wake-up calls. Vancouver is not in a magic bubble, and neither is Toronto, or Lethbridge, or Saskatoon, or Montreal. We’re all living in the same increasingly flammable world – the same world as Lahaina in Hawaii, Paradise in California, and Valparaiso in Chile. Those conflagrations were responsible for hundreds of fatalities and billions of dollars in losses. Last Tuesday, Vancouver dodged a bullet – but even so, dozens of people were driven out of their homes; repair and rebuild costs are certain to be in the tens of millions.
Note to Ms. Fry: You guys are good, but the world burns differently now.
And a note to Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim: You are not ready.
And neither are we.