“Walls of fire twice as high as the trees”: Canada’s desperate fight against the fire inferno

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Eric Florès has never seen anything like it. “The walls of flame are sometimes a hundred meters wide and twice as high as the trees,” he says. The Frenchman is one of hundreds of foreign firefighters supporting their Canadian counterparts in the fight against the catastrophic wildfires. Nearly 500 fires are currently active, an area the size of Austria had been set on fire by the end of June. 240 fires are getting out of control.

“It cannot be compared to what we know from France,” says Florès. This morning he and his troops are on duty in the particularly hard-hit region of Abitibi-Témiscamingue in the north of the province of Québec. The men are busy extinguishing the smoke to prevent another fire from breaking out.

Suddenly, flames erupted about 50 yards behind them. “Because the roots burn underground, fires can break out in places you wouldn’t expect,” explains Florès. “It’s completely unpredictable and can happen very quickly.” Completely extinguishing the fires is painstaking work. “We work meter by meter,” says Florès.

About half of the wildfires are not under control

It’s hard just to get there. Helicopters drop off the firefighters, who often have to walk for miles through the dense forest with their heavy and bulky equipment on their backs. The poisonous smoke envelops them, swarms of mosquitoes and flies follow them.

About half of the wildfires are out of control and the end is not yet in sight – the peak of the wildfire season usually falls in July or August. After a very dry spring, the fires raged earlier this year and more fiercely than ever before.

Even with support from abroad, it is impossible to fight all fires at once. Especially in sparsely populated areas, emergency services limit themselves to preventing the virus from spreading.

Danger doesn’t just lurk in the ground

“There is a 20 to 30 centimeters thick layer of highly flammable material on the ground and that makes it more difficult to control the fire,” says Florès’ colleague David Urueña, who traveled to Québec from Spain. “It starts in this layer and can spread over several kilometers.”

The fires in the North American country are also a completely new experience for Ditiro Moseki from South Africa. “It’s much easier for us. We have to dig here to get to the underground smoldering fires,” says Moseki, who is deployed to western Canada.

The thick topsoil is characteristic of the forest in the cold north – and a reason for the enormous smoke development that reaches as far as the US and even Europe. But the danger does not only lie in the ground, sometimes the treetops also catch fire.

Resin acts as a fire accelerator

“I’m completely surprised that the green trees are burning,” said Cindy Alfonso, a firefighter from Costa Rica. Coniferous trees contain a lot of resin, which acts as a fire accelerator. It throws flames so high into the air that they often throw roads and clear other obstacles.

The wildfires of unprecedented magnitude give an impression of the danger that threatens Canada in the future. According to experts, fires in the northern hemisphere’s boreal forests will become even more frequent and violent due to climate change.

However, the many fires are not only a result of climate change, they also feed it: the boreal forests emit ten to twenty times more CO per hectare burned₂ free than other ecosystems and thus contributes to global warming – a vicious cycle. (AFP)

Source: Blick