Echoes of the Fort McMurray Disaster as Fire Sweeps Into Jasper, Alberta
While I had covered many wildfires by 2016, I didn’t realize the full extent of their destructive energy until I stepped off a bus carrying journalists on the first official tour of Fort McMurray, during the tail end of a fire that had forced the panicked evacuation of the city.
In front of me was the slumped, incinerated remains of a pickup truck that presumably had once been someone’s pride. Behind it, silvery lines trickled down the blackened driveway of a now obliterated house. They were the remains of aluminum parts inside the truck that had liquefied in the wildfire’s scorching heat.
This week, similar horrors came to another Alberta community. After ravaging a large portion of Jasper National Park, two wildfires reached the town of Jasper, a resort community in one of Canada’s most scenic mountain settings.
[Read: Wildfire Roars Through a Canadian Town Popular with Tourists]
[Read: A Canadian Wildfire Grew So Intense It Made Its Own Weather]
As of Friday evening, no obvious end to the fire in Jasper was in sight, although cooler, wetter weather had slowed its spread. At that point, 358 of Jasper’s 1,113 buildings had fallen to flames.
The scale of the two disasters is not comparable, although the current fire is certainly no less painful and life altering for those affected by it. Jasper has a resident population of 5,000. At the time of its fire, 88,000 people lived in Fort McMurray.
Unlike Fort McMurray, a place in Alberta’s oil sands region that few Canadians visit, Jasper attracts 2.5 million park visitors a year. Many Canadians, particularly those who grew up in the west, have vivid memories of trips there. Danielle Smith, the usually composed premier of Alberta, was on the verge of breaking down this week during a news conference as she described the destruction, and the plight of Jasper’s residents. Some of them will be unable to return home for weeks, and others have no home to return to.
During the early years of the park, Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven painted dramatic views of its mountains, which have become defining works of Canadian art.
The destruction has rained down on Jasper just a year after an exceptional wildfire season. Inevitably, that has raised questions about the role of climate change in wildfires. One study last year concluded that the likelihood of wildfires in eastern Canada had doubled because of climate change.
There will also be questions about what steps Jasper took to mitigate fires. After the Fort McMurray disaster, a number of deficiencies in that city’s approach to fire safety emerged, even as oil companies in the area had shielded their operations from fire.
The effects of wildfire can be reduced. Last summer I went to the interior of British Columbia to look at a variety of measures that have been shown to limit the effects of wildfires on buildings.
[READ FROM 2023: How Indigenous Techniques Saved a Community From Wildfire]
On Friday, Richard Ireland, the mayor, said that Jasper was one of the first communities in Canada to introduce a program known as FireSmart, which works with homeowners and businesses on fire-mitigation measures. The Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, a symbol of the town, was certified under the program two years ago. Though it lost four buildings, its main lodge escaped the current fires.
“Conditions were indeed present for that sort of calamity,” Mr. Ireland said of the rapid move of the fire into his town. “Steps were taken to protect us. But we simply cannot do enough to protect us against all risk.”
Trans Canada
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A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for two decades. Follow him on Bluesky at @ianausten.bsky.social.
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