Abstract
Eight days into the Fort McMurray wildfire, Bruce Mayer, the assistant deputy minister of the Alberta government’s Forestry Division, sent Cordy Tymstra and a small team of wildfire science specialists to size up The Beast. Their job was to figure out what was driving this inferno to burn as big and as uncontrollably as it did, before the rains came and washed away the evidence. While the ground was still warm in some places, the team took samples from the duff, measured soil moisture, identified the age and type of trees that burned, mapped out the topography, and considered how a massive infestation of spruce budworm in the region between 2007 and 2010 may have played a role in how the fire behaved. Tymstra was surprised by how quickly the vegetation was regenerating in some of the burned areas.
To get back up to the shining world from there My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel, … Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
— Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
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Notes
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Cordy Tymstra, The Chinchaga Firestorm: When the Moon and Sun Turned Blue (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2015).
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© 2017 Edward Struzik
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Struzik, E. (2017). Inside the Mind of a Wildfire. In: Firestorm. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-819-0_3
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