Quebec and French firefighters in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region of Quebec, on July 8, 2023. CARLO ZAGLIA / AFP
In Quebec, the taiga burns continuously on over 1.5 million hectares. The record fire crackles 1,300 kilometers north of Montreal, engulfing dry moss under a cloudless but smoke-filled sky. This fire is a significant portion of the 9.9 million acres of forest and grassland that have already been reduced to rubble in Canada. Since the beginning of the year, the flames have destroyed an area equivalent to the area of Portugal. On Thursday, July 13, a firefighter died during an operation in the west of the country.
According to the Canadian government, this fire season, the “worst on record,” is only half over. The Canadian Forest Fire Interagency Center (CIFFC), which coordinates firefighter response nationally, notes that of the 3,989 fires recorded since January, 901 are still active. “Right now it’s down from 1989, a milestone year when there were 12,204 fires,” comments Marieke de Roos, Communications Officer at CIFFC. But the fires of 2023 will burn larger spaces. This trend, which has been observed for four decades, is confirmed nationwide by a study by the center: the number of forest fires is decreasing, but their intensity is increasing.
Alberta’s Great Plains in the country’s Midwest are used to fires, but the blaze has already affected eight times more acres there than the five-year average. And as June rains swamped most of the fires after a particularly heavy month of May, firefighters remain on alert. “We have several weeks of intense heat ahead of us and the Northwest is already warming up,” said Josée St-Onge, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Fire Service. The same applies to the Yukon, a Canadian region next to Alaska that has so far been relatively spared from the blaze.
Fires have been stronger than usual in Quebec and 1,044 firefighters are fighting fires closer than ever to communities. The increase in outbreaks is encouraging them to focus their efforts on the most spectacular fires: On the Alberta side, around 2,100 firefighters are fighting just five blazes. Even if that means burning dozens of kilometers of forest further north. “The priority is to put out fires near communities and industries,” says Ms St-Onge. Firefighters’ strategy, called “sustained action” in French, has become the federal standard: it’s no longer about stopping fires, it’s about containing them as much as possible.
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