Wildfires are getting worse. Here’s how we fight them now

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Wildfires are getting worse. Here’s how we fight them now’

Lilah Raptopoulos
About a month ago, New York City turned orange. People were trudging to work like normal and buying bodega sandwiches. But it was all through this apocalyptic fog. The fog had drifted down to us from Canada. Wildfires have been burning there throughout the first half of the summer. This was the first time that I’d felt the effects of a wildfire personally. But I knew, as you probably know, that they’re getting worse all over the world. In California and South Africa, in places you wouldn’t expect, like Germany and the Amazon, and most recently on a number of islands in Greece.

News clip
Greece is bracing itself for another day of intense heat, with wildfires continuing to rage. The worst affected areas are the islands of Rhodes and Evia, where the fires have been burning for days.

Lilah Raptopoulos
These fires are getting worse because of climate change. But saying that can feel really abstract because climate change is so many little things in so many different places. It left me with a lot of questions and it left my colleague Henry Mance with questions, too.

Henry Mance
You see these pictures of places on fire.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Henry Mance
And especially if you’re not from a region where, like, burning is part of the ecosystem, part of the landscape, it just seems incredible that we live alongside this and it gets worse and it gets worse, and we throw firefighters at it and we throw planes and we throw helicopters and we can’t do anything.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Henry Mance
And so I wanted to sort of speak to people and find out about, like you know, how they think about it, how they, you know, firefighters, how are they dealing with these. But what is the plan? Is there a plan?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Henry’s the FT’s chief features writer and he’s the perfect reporter for a question like this, because when Henry gets into something, he gets really into it. Like a few years ago, he started researching animals for a book he was writing, and it turned him vegan. So before he knew it, Henry was packing his bags for wildfire camp. He got on a train from London to the Polish countryside, and he joined about 200 firefighters and firefighting experts from around the world.

What did you want to get out of it?

Henry Mance
I guess, you know, I’m quite on board with the idea that the future is here and it’s pretty different and the climate is changed. And so I’m kind of preparing for that. If we’re gonna have very hot temperatures and the risk of fire, then, like, can we do something? And I really wanted to get a sense of what is the latest thinking? What is the . . . what are the clever people who understand fire thinking about controlling these blazes?

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Henry brings us to wildfire camp and tells us what he learned, why they’ve gotten bigger and more dangerous and also what we do now that they’re here. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. 

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Henry, hi. Welcome back to the show.

Henry Mance
Hey, great to be on again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Henry, tell me the story. So you showed up at wildfire fighting camp in Poland. Where were you? Who were you with? Were you the only novice? (Chuckles) What was it like?

Henry Mance
(Chuckles) Yes. So I took the train to Berlin, and then we drove over the border into Poland, into these plantations. They have this sort of state-managed forest. And we were there with a group, the European Forest Institute, and also Snep, which is a sort of Polish firefighters’ organisation, and also Pau Costa Foundation, which does a lot of fire prevention work within Europe. So the aim of this camp was to really bring people together from different countries because all these countries across Europe and indeed further afield — there are some from Lebanon, some from Ukraine, from the US — they’re all seeing very similar problems. And yet what they’re having to deal with at their national level is often people who don’t understand these problems, haven’t seen them, who are sort of surprised by these wildfires. So it was a real sort of partly to get some morale among firefighters who, you know, are now seeing conditions that are much less promising than when they were a bit younger.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. So set the scene for us. What was it like?

Henry Mance
So we’re in a . . . was kind of a strange set of quite primitive resort buildings next to a huge lake and in the middle of this state-managed pine plantation. So it’s very dry on the ground, the sun’s high in the sky. And you know, needles on the floor, very regimented trees. And it’s sort of, it has a slightly weird vibe of like a . . . almost like a sort of army camp. But I guess it was somewhere people might go on holiday.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, OK. So can you take us through your day? Like, what was . . . how long were you there? What was it like? Were you waking up in the morning and, like, fighting fires? Or were you having breakfast (chuckles) and then . . . 

Henry Mance
Yes. I mean, this was . . . What we were trying to do, and what the organisers were trying to do with this fire camp was to show people the various different techniques you can use if you’re facing a forest fire or a wildfire. And so we would, actually traipsing round quite a big area, I think, ended up walking 20 to 30 kilometres in a day with a map, trying to navigate from one point to the other and simulate what it is like being thrown into an area where you’re not exactly sure where the forest fire is. You might be given a report of it where you’re not sure how you can contain it, but you might need to find some way of containing it. It’s . . . and you know, it’s somewhere between some kind of a hiking expedition and then a very sort of, you know, physical, you know, manual labour to try and create a barrier that the fire can’t get across.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
To get a better sense of how hard it is to fight wildfires now, Henry and his new camp friends, simulated fighting real fires — things like digging a long trench in the dirt in an area that you anticipate the fire reaching, which ideally the fire is not able to jump over. Or everyone getting in a row at the edge of a fire and using a tool called the beater, which looks like this giant shovel to try to beat down and smother the flames.

Henry Mance
And you do it as a long line, and our South African instructor described, you know, long lines of South African firefighters doing this, hundreds of people singing while they did it. And you know, the beaters going up, beaters going down, and trying to put out these grass fires. And it’s sort of . . . it seems incredibly, you know, basic to be putting out fires in that way. But those are the tools we’re having. And you know, you can’t just try and spray water on everything, because often the water connection isn’t there. And with the really big fires, actually water is not enough.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah. Didn’t somebody that you interview say something like, sometimes these planes are like spitting on a campfire?

Henry Mance
Yeah, I love that. (Chuckles) I love that image. And I think it’s a great frustration because, you know, politicians every summer, they see these problems and they say, “Oh, we’re gonna do something”. So they buy some planes. And that’s what the EU has done. The EU . . . different countries have their own and different parts of countries have their own fire units. But the EU has said their solidarity will buy 20 more planes and helicopters and this is just nothing. And yet it’s very, very expensive. If you’re spending tens of millions of dollars on each of these very impressive-looking planes, but they can’t actually solve the problem. And I think the frustration from fire experts and firefighters is you could spend this money much better on preventing fires by investing in landscape schemes, investing in detection and monitoring. And . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Henry Mance
Then we might have a chance at lowering the intensity of some of these fires. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
There are a few things happening at the same time to the climate that’s causing these wildfires. First, because temperatures are getting hotter, places that used to have moisture in the air are getting a lot drier, and that means that forests are more flammable. Second, scientists are seeing more wind, which fans the fires. Third, we’re getting more lightning, and that’s how a lot of fires start. So there are more ignition sources. What’s interesting is the result here isn’t more fires, but rather fires that are more intense. They’re so much more intense that they even behave differently than they used to. Henry calls the kind of fires we saw in Canada recently “mega-fires”.

Henry Mance
Just to give you some figures from British Columbia alone, OK, so as of June, they had had about 900,000 hectares burnt. The seasonal average over the last 20 years for that time of year was have about 16,000 hectares.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow!

Henry Mance
So what they have this year is 50 times.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Fifty times. So from 16,000 to 900,000.

Henry Mance
They get so hot and they burn so quickly. And they, you know, these are, you can have different types of fire, right. These are fires, they burn up each tree from top to bottom. They leap from the leaves to . . . from the branches to the next tree. And they race away and they create almost their own weather. And they also, with the wind that surrounds them, embers get thrown off. And these are fires that can jump over rivers, jump over roads, jump over . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, my gosh.

Henry Mance
. . . barriers that are traditionally thought of as firebreaks.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
So firefighters around the world just aren’t prepared for this new kind of fire. A lot of them have no experience with wildfires. They’re used to fighting house fires or city fires, which is totally different. With wildfires you need good walking shoes, not bulky boots. You don’t have a hose and a hydrant. You actually need to carry your food and water with you because you could be out there for days or weeks on end. And then on top of that, these fires have gotten so much wilder that even experienced wildfire fighters have to basically throw out the old rule book.

You wrote in your piece this line that stuck with me that said, “What does it mean to be a student of fire when all the textbooks are out of date?” Like, is the image that we have of modern wildfire fighting really very different from the practices?

Henry Mance
Yeah. I mean, I love this phrase that a lot of firefighters use, which is, you know, “to be a student of fire”. And that’s all about humility, right? It’s all about the fact that fire is not something to be played with. And I think especially over the last couple of decades, there’s been a real focus on firefighters keeping each other safe. Right. So don’t try and be the hero because firefighters have, you know, have died. It’s a dangerous line of work. And so there’s a real . . . there’s a real emphasis on “Watch the fire”. Don’t assume you know what the fire is gonna do because you’ve seen it at similar fires before, because there are all these factors like the wind speed, the potential changes in the weather. The landscape may be slightly different to the one you’re used to, etc. So they say, “Be a student of fire”. And yet the textbooks will tell you things like, you know, at night there may be an opportunity to attack the fire because, you know, temperature drops, humidity rises at night, and therefore the fire might burn a bit less intensely. But what we . . . what I’m told now we’re seeing, for example, in Spain, are fires that burn almost as strongly at the night as they do in the day. They find their fuel sources and they just get going and they just keep this intensity. And there aren’t these chances to attack the fire. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Others said there are preventative measures you can take to keep things from getting so bad. One of them is quite literally fighting fire with fire. This is a historic practice that we do much less often than we used to, especially in North America. For thousands of years, indigenous people set controlled fires in their cold season. These were pre-planned, low-intensity fires that got rid of low-growing plants and shrubs that could fuel bigger fires down the line. It kept things contained.

Henry Mance
So the landscape and species have evolved for fire. It leads to a renewal, right? So old trees may get burnt up and that they get replaced by new trees. So fire is this renewing force. And yeah, indigenous peoples in North America really understood this. And there was, you know, a wonderful study just showing how much of California — what is now California — was burnt before the arrival of white settlers. And it’s a huge amount. And the sort of estimate is that, you know, in a typical summer, these controlled burns would actually make the sky smoky. Having smoke in the sky would have been a very normal thing before the arrival of white settlers because of this practice of burning. And then you create also, I mean, what farmers use burning for still now is, you know, you burn the grass, you create fresh pasture for your livestock, and that is a source of meat and milk.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. And then just to clarify, and then white European settlers came and they started seeing the burning of the land, controlled burning as like this magical, mystical kind of thing.

Henry Mance
Yeah. There’s a famous . . . I mean, the most famous historian of fire is a guy called Stephen Pyne. And the way he relates it is that the Enlightenment couldn’t really deal with fire or, you know, once we understood how fire worked, you know, oxygen or, all these things, then we wanted to restrain it and contain it. Western Europe, temperate western Europe — so northern France, England, what is now Germany — these were countries without fire in the landscape and this was the dominant mindset that went out to places like the Americas.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, where they were used to fire and where fire should have . . .

Henry Mance
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah . . . Makes sense. Yeah.

Henry Mance
So there was certainly this misunderstanding of how ecosystems worked and that, you know, ecosystems could be kept without fires. And we became very good. And, you know, we’ve very heroic work by firefighters at putting out fires, at detecting fires and trying to put them out straight away. Now, this is now seen as having been a sort of self-defeating strategy that you manage to put out fires, but you just leave bigger fires in store.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The experts Henry spoke with recommend that we do more prescribed burnings as a form of prevention. They also suggest more livestock grazing. So there are some solutions. There are also better methods of fighting these fires now, like strategically bulldozing large strips of trees and even houses to create firebreaks. I’ve linked to Henry’s magazine story on this in the show notes.

But despite all of these improvements, I was left feeling a little bit like: Is this all gonna be enough?

So I’m like picturing you on your way back from this camp and on the train back to London. And I am curious what you were thinking. Like, did you feel any hope? (Laughter) Did you . . . were you surprised by anything?

Henry Mance
I think one of the more optimistic things or more hopeful things to remember is that even some of these really bad fires actually don’t have to result in that many deaths or even in any death. So the Fort McMurray fire in Canada, which if you Google it, was an absolutely extraordinary fire. And that actually it led to 80,000 people being evacuated. Nobody was directly killed by fire. Two people who were evacuated by car were in a car crash and, very sadly, died. And that’s a real hopeful sign that we can protect ourselves with warning systems. With preparedness, we can make these disasters less lethal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Well, that makes me feel better. (Laughter)

Henry Mance
(Laughter) That’s just (inaudible). Oh, God.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Henry, can I . . . I guess my last question is just like: Do you see a time in which you will be willing to fight a wildfire? Are you (chuckles) . . . did this inspire you?

Henry Mance
I’m seriously tempted. I mean, I am tempted to go out and fight a wildfire. There was one German guy who was there, Nico, and he was great. He was really good at all the exercises we did. And he was right on top of it. And he was going straight out to South Africa to help them fight some grass fires as a volunteer. And they were like, “If you can pay your way there, we’ll sort you out for accommodation once you’re there.” And so I really kind of . . . I kind of almost wanted to follow him on the plane.

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Chuckles) Yeah.

Henry Mance
But I think I . . . yeah, I think there isn’t huge recognition for it. But you’ve really got to believe it’s the right thing to do.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Henry, this is wonderful. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Henry Mance
Thanks so much for having me, Lilah. 

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. Henry’s piece again is in the show notes. And just so you know, every FT link that you click there will get you past the paywall. If you want to explore more on FT.com, we have the best trial and subscription options for you. They’re at ft.com/weekendpodcast.

Next week we have the one and only David Byrne on the podcast. He has a new show on Broadway out called Here Lies Love and his classic Talking Heads concert documentary Stop Making Sense is being remastered and re-released by A24 next month.

As you know, we love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I am on Instagram and Twitter, but mostly talking to all of you on Instagram @lilahrap.

I am Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week. 

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