From the Bookshelf of Science and Inquiry…

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

John Vaillant

Start date: March 1, 2025

Finish date: March 31, 2025

Discussion: Book Club 2025

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Book Club 2025

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What Members Thought

Feb 14, 2024 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: bleak-and-dark, favorites, dropped-the-mic, unbearably-sad, non-fiction, history, science, academic-notations

‘Fire Weather’ by John Vaillant is several books in one: Canadian history, the science of fire, world climate statistics, history of the politics of oil, gas and coal companies, and all about the Canadian Fort McMurray fire. The author has written a monumental book! It is well-written, and well-researched with extensive and reputable source material, and scary. There are photos, charts and drawings. Also, if readers want to see how Fort McMurray, an Albertan Province oil-company town created for ...more

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May 03, 2025 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing

Shelves: environment, science, technology, history, politics, meteorology

This is truly a fantastic book! Much of the book is devoted to a single wildfire, which overtook Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. This part of the book was riveting, as it described how firefighters came to the area, and their plan of attack. However, the fire was so tremendous that the firefighters could not prevent the fire from entering the city. Instead, they executed an evacuation, which luckily was very successful. There were few escape routes, and many people fleeing in cars had This is truly a fantastic book! Much of the book is devoted to a single wildfire, which overtook Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. This part of the book was riveting, as it described how firefighters came to the area, and their plan of attack. However, the fire was so tremendous that the firefighters could not prevent the fire from entering the city. Instead, they executed an evacuation, which luckily was very successful. There were few escape routes, and many people fleeing in cars had to pass through the fire.

Hurricanes can devastate large regions, but at least they are predictable days in advance. Wildfires can spring up and grow at an exponential rate, which makes them unpredictable. On the morning of the fire at Fort McMurray, people were told to go about their business as usual, and not to worry about the nearby fire. By early afternoon a general evacuation was announced, and the fire began to encroach on the city.

The book describes how the weather encourages intense fires, and how, in turn, the fires change the weather pattern. There was an intense phenomenon known as a fire tornado, in which a huge whirlwind hundreds of yards in diameter and thousands of feet in height develop, and are full of fire.

Years ago, when all furniture was made of wood, houses would burn. Nowadays, when so much of a house and its interior is made of plastic components, houses don't just burn -- they explode. The plastic itself does not initially burn; but when heated, the plastic emits fumes that burn.

The firefighters noticed that in suburban developments, the fire would destroy house after house, at a rate of one house every five minutes. So, to set up equipment to protect houses, they had to allow for the 20-minute set-up time, and spray water onto houses that are 4 or 5 downwind from the fire.

The book is about much more than just the fire at Fort McMurray. It describes in some detail the development of the bitumen industry, on which Fort McMurray is based. It describes the effects of climate change on the increase in intense wildfires, and the root causes of climate change. The discussion is interesting and always pertinent.

I did not read this book -- I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated expertly by Alan Carlson. ...more

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Dec 14, 2023 CatReader rated it liked it

Shelves: cnet, no-audiobook

The summer of 2023 here in the Great Lakes of the US where I live was unexpectedly smoky -- we were under air quality alerts almost daily for weeks, with the worst episode in late June/early July featuring an eerie yellow smog, the pervasive smell of burnt barbecue, and thick, acrid air that made me feel ill and reach for my KN95 mask from COVID days just to walk from the parking garage at work to my office. The culprit? Extreme, record-shattering Canadian wildfires which burned an estimated 18. ...more

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Apr 30, 2025 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: non-fiction, rws-2025-spring

This book kept me up at night because:
1) it read like a thriller-were the residents of Fort McMurray going to evacuate successfully, were the fire fighters going to survive and were they going to be able to save parts of the city
2) And with Lahaina, Paradise and LA additionally in the recent past, how vulnerable am I and other family scattered across the western U.S.

Valiant does an excellent job describing the history of Fort McMurray, the challenges facing the firefighters (including that they ...more

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