‘We were not prepared’: Canada fought nightmarish wildfires as smoke became US problem

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 Canada’s wildfires in 2023 unprecedented doesn’t capture the magnitude of what happened, said Michael Flannigan, a professor specializing in wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Sometimes we have bad fire in the west, sometimes in central Canada and occasionally in eastern Canada. But at times in 2023, the whole country was basically on fire," he said.

"I've been working fires fairly closely since the 1970s. I have never seen a situation like we saw in 2023."

The conditions leading up to 2023's cross-country inferno have been building in Canada for more than a century. Two key factors are involved, Flannigan and other experts say:

• Human-driven climate change has caused temperatures to rise and soil moisture to decrease, and has intensified extreme weather that helps whip up fires.
• Generations of putting out wildfires to protect cities and industries has broken the natural cycles of fire in the forest, leading to much denser tree populations and accumulated dry, dead materials on the forest floor that act as fuel.

Canada's area burned in wildfire has doubled since the 1970s — "if you include 2023, we can say it's quadrupled," Flannigan said. The western U.S. has also quadrupled its area burned in wildfires in that time, for much the same reasons.

"The increases we are seeing are due almost exclusively to climate change," Flannigan said. "A warmer world means more fire."

And it means a more frequent public health issue in America. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency compiles an Air Quality Index, measuring the five major air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act: ground-level ozone, particle pollution, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide — all of them health hazards, all worsened by or potentially present in wildfire smoke. The higher the index number, the worse the air.

Detroit's worst Air Quality Index daily score in 2022 was 133. The city had nine days last summer that met or exceeded that mark, with a high of 200, one point below the index category of “Very Unhealthy,” according to EPA data.

The air quality was even worse in Philadelphia and New York. Smoke from Quebec wildfires on June 7, 2023, caused "Very Unhealthy" air quality in those two U.S. cities, with Philadelphia's score of 290 just 10 points below "Hazardous," EPA's most severe Air Quality Index category, a condition where the health of anyone who breathes the air is at risk.

The FAA issued a ground stop for flights at LaGuardia Airport in New York that day due to poor visibility from the thick Canadian wildfire smoke. And researchers reviewing data from 53 hospital emergency departments in New York found asthma-related ER visits increased nearly 44% over those smoky few days around June 7.

Canadian wildfire smoke similarly caused air quality to plummet in other U.S. cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest, south to cities like Nashville and west into the Dakotas.

New research by the nonprofit World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch Initiative and the University of Maryland found the 2023 Canadian wildfires released 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide — nearly four times the carbon emissions of the global aviation sector in 2022.

One of the world's largest forests

To begin to understand Canada's wildfire threat, first understand the vastness of Canada's forests. With about 1.4 million square miles of forest land, Canada is the third-most forested country in the world, trailing only Russia and Brazil. Canada's forest is 15 times the surface area of all of the Great Lakes combined.

"I got a lot of calls in the summer when the smoke was everywhere — 'Why aren’t you putting out these fires?' " Flannigan said.

"You fight all of your fires in the western United States, and the area burned has quadrupled there. Just because you fight them doesn’t mean you can put them out."

Canada's is the largest remaining intact forest on Earth, even larger than the Amazon rainforest.

"People around the world probably don't really comprehend just the scale of the forested area that we have," said Richard Carr, a physical scientist and fire research analyst with the Canadian Forest Service in Edmonton.

"You can get into the northern parts of the provinces and the territories and there's places where you could drive for several hours without running across a town — just huge expanses of forest with not many people there. So trying to put a fire out in that takes a lot of time to get people and equipment into those areas, if it's even necessary."

Canada's predominant forest type is boreal, a cold-hardy ecosystem dominated by cone-bearing evergreen trees: various types of pine, larch, spruce and fir, along with nonconiferous poplar, birch and aspen. The forests tend to grow very densely, the tree canopy allowing little sunlight through to the forest floor. Canada's boreal forest stretches from the Yukon near Alaska east to Newfoundland and Labrador on the Atlantic Coast, more than 1.2 billion acres.

A changing climate increasing temperatures and reducing moisture, and a thickening forest where fires are often combated and put out, have primed conditions for larger, more intense wildfires, Flannigan said.

"A lightning strike that hits the ground or a tree in the 1950s maybe doesn’t even start a fire," he said. "And today, because things are drier, it starts a fire that grows to 20,000 acres."

Some fire experts and scientists have been aware of the problem — and its increasing intensity — for decades.

"It is clear that a successful record of fire suppression has led to a fuel buildup in the forests of British Columbia. The fuel buildup means that there will be more significant and severe wildfires, and there will be more interface fires (reaching human structures) unless action is taken." That was the finding of a blue-ribbon panel's report to the British Columbia government in January 2004, following a record-breaking year of wildfires the previous summer in which about 1,000 square miles of the province burned.

More than 10 times that area, nearly 11,000 square miles, burned in British Columbia wildfires last summer.

The report on the 2003 wildfires recommended a much more significant effort be undertaken on fuel reduction in the forests. It mostly went unheeded, said Robert Gray, a co-author of the report and wildland fire ecologist.

"Certainly, those initial problems we identified have not been addressed," he said.

Gray runs his own company, RW Gray Consulting based in Chilliwack, British Columbia, that works with groups and local governments on understanding and mitigating their wildfire risks. He's done similar work on the American side of the border.

Since the time of that report on the 2003 wildfires, the forests have piled up even more fire fuels, Gray said. A significant mountain pine beetle epidemic about 10 years ago killed more than 77,000 square miles of forest in British Columbia, he said, leaving dry, dead trees that create an even better recipe for large wildfires.

"And then over that 20-year period, climate change has really kicked into overdrive," he said.

Canada had its warmest summer on record last year, dating to the start of national recordkeeping in 1948, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the nation's equivalent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The temperature from May to July 2023 exceeded Canada's previous national temperature records for the two-month period by 0.8 degrees Celsius, about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

Including May and September, each province and territory in Canada recorded its warmest five months on record, with the exception of its Atlantic region.

"So we've got the bottom-up problem, the fuels, which has not gotten better; and then we have the top-down side which is the weather and climate," Gray said.

Quebec saw nearly 17,400 square miles burned in 2023 wildfires, a record for area burned in the province. A study last year by researchers with the Canadian Forest Service; Environment and Climate Change Canada; Imperial College in London, United Kingdom; the University of Quebec at Montreal; and others found that due to its impact on hotter temperatures, less moisture and more extreme weather, "climate change made the cumulative severity of Quebec's 2023 fire season to the end of July around 50% more intense, and seasons of this severity at least seven times more likely to occur."

"Peak fire weather like that experienced (in 2023) is at least twice as likely, and the intensity has increased by about 20% due to human-induced climate change," the study found.

Record-setting coastal wildfire: 'That doesn't happen in Nova Scotia'

The Atlantic coast community of Barrington, Nova Scotia, is dubbed the Lobster Capital of Canada. Many of the city's 6,600 residents have some tie to lobstering; modest house after house has stacks of rectangular lobster traps in the driveway. A daily, steady flow of fishing boats moves into and out of the nearby harbor.

A foggy marine layer descends over the area almost every night, and often multiple times a day. Firefighters here said they've watched that atmospheric moisture from the ocean and nearby lakes snuff out small wildfires without them even needing to deploy their hoses. Barrington - Port La Tour Fire Chief Paul Thomas has worked for the department for more than four decades, since 1980. He couldn't recall a wildfire that took longer than a day to put out.

Then came May 26, 2023 — the start of the largest wildfire in Nova Scotia's recorded history.

What happened near Barrington Lake that day isn't fully clear, at least to the public — though local speculation has run rampant. But according to Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources and Renewables, a local man, Dalton Clark Stewart, 22, of Villagedale, Shelburne County, was charged under the province's Forests Act with:

• Lighting a fire on privately owned land without permission of the owner or occupier.
• Failing to take reasonable efforts to prevent the spread of a fire.
• Leaving a fire unattended.

Stewart has pleaded not guilty and the case is pending in a provincial court. If convicted, he could face a fine of up to $50,000 Canadian and/or up to six months in prison.

"At the time the fire started, it was very dry, windy and low humidity — just the perfect storm of bad conditions for a fire," said Dwayne Hunt, fire service coordinator and director of the emergency management office for the Municipality of Barrington.

A provincial Natural Resources firefighting crew, along with a local department, were on the Barrington Lake fire that afternoon and evening, and seemed to make headway with it, Hunt said.

The crews stopped their work overnight, a standard practice, and the Natural Resources crew returned the next day — Saturday, May 27, 2023. That's when the fire got away from them, Hunt said.

The crews told Thomas they expected the wildfire to spread to the Clyde River and the community's main route, Highway 103, by Sunday morning, May 28. It reached both just after midnight that night. Emergency officials evacuated affected homes.

Air temperatures didn't drop, and humidity didn't fall overnight. At midnight, the fire was crowning, spreading through the tops of trees, the most intense type of wildfire, Hunt said.

"That doesn’t happen in Nova Scotia," he said.

Sunrise on Sunday brought many more evacuations. The relentless wind kept shifting directions, and the fire zigged and zagged, destroying homes and cottages as it went, doubling back on areas it had earlier passed and spared.

"This fire just kept growing in every direction," Hunt said.

By that weekend, it was the largest wildfire Thomas had seen in the area in his more than four decades of fighting fires there. It would grow and spread for another week out of control, ultimately burning more than 90 square miles — relatively small by the standards of big wildfires in Quebec, Alberta or British Columbia, but the largest wildfire ever in Nova Scotia.

At one point, three fire crews extended 16, 100-foot sections of hose into the woods to spray down trees and try to suppress the fire. A Natural Resources helicopter pilot radioed in that the fire was headed in their direction, out of control and fast. The crews were forced to uncouple their hoses, leave them lying on the forest floor, and beat a retreat.

"Before the fire ever got to a house, it was so thick and so hot, the smoke, you couldn’t fight it," Barrington-Port La Tour deputy fire chief Arthur Doane said.

"There was no way you could stand in front of it, or stand to the side and put water on it. The smoke was so thick and so hot, it was super-heating everything before the actual flames got there. Even if we were there when a house caught fire, we wouldn’t have been able to put it out. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face."

By Monday, May 29, 2023, the wildfire had doubled in size, Hunt said. By nightfall Monday, it had doubled in size again.

Response was complicated by wildfires popping up in other parts of Nova Scotia, pulling away resources, including one on May 28, 2023, in Halifax that forced the evacuation of thousands and ultimately damaged or destroyed more than 200 homes and other buildings.

Fire officials thought they would have to evacuate thousands in Barrington as the fire bore down on the community. Then on Saturday, June 2, 2023, at last nature gave the firefighters a break. A steady rain developed that helped bring the fire under control.

"Without that rain, we might have lost hundreds of homes," Thomas said.

The fire took another two months to fully extinguish. Over 100 properties were damaged, including some 31 camps, cottages and houses. Twelve primary residences were destroyed, and seven of the homeowners didn't have insurance, Shelburne County senior safety coordinator Shawna Symonds said.

"We were completely overwhelmed. We were not prepared for something like this," she said.

Fire victims who lost their homes pick up the charred pieces of their lives

Barry Doane, a resident of nearby Goose Lake, received a call on Saturday, May 27, 2023, from his son, who was frantically packing up and evacuating his cottage on Barrington Lake.

"He said, 'The fire is coming your way,' " Barry Doane said. "I just didn't figure it would."

Doane — no known relation to Barrington - Port La Tour deputy fire chief Arthur Doane — began to see helicopters descending on the lake a stone's throw from his house, scooping buckets of water to drop on the incoming fire.

That afternoon, a first responder came to Doane's door and told him he might have to evacuate "within a couple of hours," Barry Doane recalled.

About five minutes later, the first responder was back. "You need to leave now," he said.

Barry Doane grabbed his cat, some cat food, a suitcase full of clothes and not much else. He figured he would be back soon.

Over the week that Barry Doane stayed with a friend, rumors spread of different houses being destroyed. But he heard from a few fire and law enforcement personnel who had passed through the area that his home was intact. Later, he heard it wasn't.

By the time he was able to return about a week later, he found his home destroyed. Doane had no insurance.

"I just sat in my truck and cried," he said. "I started raking through stuff and it was useless. It was just so much of a mess."

Doane now lives in a modular home, rebuilt over the ashes of his former residence through the assistance of Shelburne County, the province of Nova Scotia and the Red Cross. Traumatic reminders of the fire surround him everywhere — blackened trees, a boat trailer with charred wooden beams and melted taillights.

"I dream of good things when I go to bed," he said. "But then it's 3 a.m. and thoughts of the fire come back, thinking about what you lost.

"Just little things play tricks on your mind."

Doane is thankful for the community support he has received: clothes, blankets, furniture and more. But he's concerned he may potentially have to take over mortgage or rent-to-own payments on his home after a couple of years' grace from the Red Cross.

"I'm 72 years old this July," he said. "With all my expenses and everything, where's it going to come from, or where am I going to go? It gives you uncertainty about the future."

'You've got to get out'

Norma Mcgray, then 88, lived near Clyde River her entire life. On Sunday, May 28, 2023, she went to church that morning, and saw smoke from the Barrington Lake wildfire in the air. By the time she returned from the service, her street was blocked and fire trucks were everywhere.

"They were knocking on my door, saying, 'You've got to get out,' " she said. "They kept yelling at me to get out.

"You didn't know what to take; you didn't have time to take anything. But I did go back and grab my important papers. They were still yelling at me to get out, so the fire must have been close. They had a sense of urgency in their voice."

She stayed with a friend who had an apartment in Barrington. Still not knowing the fate of her house, Mcgray spent her time volunteering at the local Lions Club where she was a member, feeding fellow displaced residents and helping get donated items to them.

"I could not just sit around and do nothing," she said.

After a week, Mcgray learned her trailer, her home since 1975, was destroyed in the blaze. When she finally got to return to the site, everything was gone. "I  was just  devastated," she said.

Mcgray, now 89, lives in a senior apartment in Barrington that opened up within a few weeks of her being displaced. It's the lost memories that affect Mcgray the most — the photo albums full of pictures of her son's graduation, or his time in the military, compiled when digital images weren't around, she said.

She also lost most of her favorite jewelry, but not all of it. As the emergency officials were yelling for her to evacuate, as she went back in to grab important documents, "I got halfway across the living room and I thought about the ring that my son had bought me from Europe," she said.

She got the ring, as well as another prized jade ring. But everything else, all of the items collected over a lifetime, are gone. Nothing from her past colors the place where she will probably live out her remaining days. "I'm not the only one; everybody whose house burned lost the same kinds of things," she said.

"I'm here now. I mean, this is nice, but it's not home. But you're glad to find a place."

A city of more than 20,000 flees wildfire

Among the record-shattering aspects of Canada's 2023 wildfire season was the number of people it displaced. Approximately 232,000 people had to leave their homes across the country — a number greater than the 10 largest wildfire evacuations since 1980 combined.

In Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, the entire city of more than 20,000 residents was forced to evacuate for three weeks.

The fire threatening the city had started in mid-July. But when strong winds pushed the fire beyond a line that public safety officials were comfortable with, the community scrambled to evacuate, Mayor Rebecca Alty said.

"Looking at the weather forecast, the fire subject matter experts made the recommendation that we do a whole-community evacuation on that Wednesday," Aug. 16, she said. "It looked like the fire was going to reach our boundary by about Friday. With only one way in and out of Yellowknife by road, there was also that need of, if the fire is going to threaten the community, we have to move sooner rather than later."

The city was lucky the mass evacuation wasn't even more of a logistical nightmare, Alty said.

"A week later, I think we would have had even more residents in town because school was just about to begin again, so there were still a lot of people that were on vacation and out of town," she said. "And with the fires being as close as they were, we had poor air quality for a couple of weeks. So some folks had already left town just to get to better air quality."

The majority of residents drove out of town once the evacuation order was issued, and those without their own vehicles were flown out on government-chartered aircraft. Evacuation of the local hospital and nearby senior care facilities were the most challenging, and the Canadian military assisted where needed, Alty said.

For those without friends and family to drive to, care facilities and hotel rooms were arranged in Alberta, with the closest reception center about 18 hours away. For some, it was more of a financial challenge than others, Alty said.

"It was a lot like COVID — we were all in the same storm, but different boats," she said.

"Some residents had an 'evac-cation' of three weeks off, a great time to spend with family and friends. For others, it was very difficult financially. Three weeks in a hotel with a family of five, it gets challenging."

One of the largest wildfires in Quebec's record-breaking 2023 occurred near Chibougamau, the largest town in Nord-du-Québec, the largest but least populous of 17 administrative regions of the province. The region has nearly 290,000 square miles of land area, about 55% of the total land area of Quebec, but with only about 0.5% of the province's population.

The town of about 7,600 residents was forced to evacuate in early June, and residents were away for six days before the all-clear to return was issued.

"The fire was at around 20 or 25 kilometers from Chibougamau but we had the impact of the smoke," Mayor Manon Cyr said. "SOPFEU (the provincial wildfire fighting agency) was worried that they didn't have any control on the fire and they were unable to guarantee the safety of our population."

Normally, nightfall brought more humidity, less wind and less dryness, Cyr said. But that wasn't happening.

Like many remote communities in Canada's vast forests, Chibougamau has only one route in and out, Cyr said. Wildfires nearby are not uncommon.

"But every time (in the past) it was not like it was last summer — the size of it, the lack of control, they were quite different," she said.

A multibillion-dollar problem

The total cost of the 2023 wildfires across Canada in damage, response and recovery, is still being calculated.

"It’s into the billions of dollars," said Harjit Sajjan, Canada's minister of emergency preparedness.

The stunning Canadian wildfire season of 2023 didn't cause a seismic shift in Canadian government thinking or action, Sajjan said. Previous years of megafires had already done that: Fort McMurray in 2016; the 1,300 wildfires in British Columbia in 2017 that burned 4,600 square miles of the province, displaced 65,000 British Columbians and cost the province more than $564 million Canadian; the 323-square-mile wildfire in Lytton, British Columbia, in June and July 2021 that led to two deaths, more than 1,000 evacuations, and more than $200 million Canadian in costs.

The Canadian government launched the Firefighting and Managing Wildfires in a Changing Climate program beginning in 2022, providing $256 million over five years to provinces and territories to purchase wildland firefighting equipment and increase capacity to prepare for and prevent fires.

Canada has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in WildFireSat, a monitoring satellite set to be launched by 2029, that will monitor Canada's wildfires from space and provide real-time data to managers determining what fires need prioritizing, and where.

The nation's efforts include an expansion of FireSmart, a program providing training and resources for citizens to better prepare their homes and properties to withstand wildfires, such as clearing ignitable materials from near their homes.

But all of those efforts don't lower summer temperatures, or combat drought, or increase winter snowpack to saturate the ground in spring that keeps coming earlier than ever.

Public Safety Canada on June 12 issued an updated forecast for the 2024 wildfire season, predicting high wildfire risk to continue over coming months, especially in regions of the country continuing to experience intense drought such as northwestern Alberta, northeastern British Columbia and southern Northwest Territories, as above-normal temperatures are predicted throughout the summer.

The work will continue on how to better prevent, predict, respond to and recover from wildfires, Sajjan said.

"If these situations are going to occur — and the scientists are telling us that they will — then we need to be looking at preventing the impacts of those wildfires, especially on people and on property," he said.

Canada and the U.S. should prepare to see more fire and smoke going forward, Flannigan said.

"Not every year is going to be a bad fire year; some years are going to be cooler and wetter as Siberia gets the heat wave, or Europe gets the heat wave, and that's where the problems are," he said. "But our fire activity is going to increase."

Wildfire is a natural occurrence that can actually improve the health of forests. But unnatural conditions through fire suppression and a warmer, drier climate have caused wildfires burning too large, with shortening gaps between wildfires in the same location, Flannigan said.

About 5% of Canada's massive forestland burned in 2023.

"People say, 'If the fire increases, the forests are going to disappear.' And they are right," Flannigan said. "It may well be that is happening already in certain places where you get repeat fires too close together.

"We are going to see more fires. And if the forest does disappear, what replaces it? Grasslands? Shrub lands? Grass can burn every year — in fact, grass can burn twice a year."

Said Sajjan, "The reality is, we are dealing with this. We have to learn and get better at how we live with it."

Detroit Free Press reporter Keith Matheny and photographer Eric Seals are the Pulitzer Center's 2024 Richard C. Longworth Media Fellows. Contact Matheny: [email protected].