NFPA Journal - May/June 2017 - 61

A wildfire started on Sunday, May 1, 2016, in a bog near
Fort McMurray, a major hub of oil production in Alberta.
Written off at first as merely another wildfire in an area
that's used to them, it took just a few hours for fire officials
to realize that the blaze was not an ordinary fire event; conditions meant the fire was growing fast and roaring toward
the city of roughly 60,000 residents. That night a state of
emergency was declared in Fort McMurray.
The following days proved stressful and sleepless for fire
officials, who were tasked with coordinating the evacuation
of over 90,000 people along just one major highway. "I really
believed at the end of Tuesday, if we wake up at first light
and we've got 50 percent of our homes left and we've only
killed a few thousand people, we'd have done well. That's
how bad I felt," Darby Allen, fire chief of Wood Buffalo, a
municipality that includes Fort McMurray, told the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation.
In the end, the human cost wasn't as bad as Allen feared;
nobody died in the fire. But approximately 1.5 million acres
were burned before the fire, nicknamed "The Beast," was
mostly contained two months later. The fire left vast swaths
of Fort McMurray looking like a warzone, with cars reduced
to paint-stripped bodies, homes to concrete foundations, and
trees to blackened trunks. About 15 percent of the city was
destroyed, including an estimated 2,400 structures. Loss estimates for the fire approached $10 billion-including direct
losses like property damage as well as indirect losses like lost
wages and reduced oil production-making it the costliest
disaster in Canadian history.
A few months after the fire, Alan Westhaver, a wildfire
behavior analyst, published a report for the Toronto-based
Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction that reinforced the
importance of wildfire prevention and preparedness efforts.
Westhaver will lead an education session on the report and
the lessons learned from the Fort McMurray wildfire at the
Conference & Expo.
Westhaver's report, "Why Some Homes Survived: Learning from the Fort McMurray Wildfire Disaster," concluded
that structure loss in the fire was not random, but instead
dependent on homes' wildfire preparedness as established
by guidelines put forth by FireSmart, a Canadian wildfire
preparedness program similar to NFPA's Firewise. According to the report, 81 percent of homes that survived the fire
had a FireSmart hazard rating of low to moderate, meaning
they were well-prepared for a wildfire, and all of the homes
that survived despite extreme exposure to the fire had a
low hazard rating. Conversely, most of the homes that were
destroyed in the fire had high to extreme FireSmart hazard
ratings.
While there is no "silver bullet," or one measure to ensure
a home's survival in a wildfire, Westhaver's report concludes,
there can be an "Achilles' heel," or one weakness, even when
all other FireSmart guidelines are followed, that can lead to a
home's ignition and destruction.
Shew, the CAL FIRE official, agrees. "Preventing structure
loss during wildland fires is a combination of things," he said.
"It's not just one thing. You could have all the defensible space

you want, but if your home hasn't been solidified to resist the
intrusion of embers blowing during a wildfire, you will have a
very, very high risk of having your home destroyed."
It's likely that had more homes been solidified, or hardened,
in Fort McMurray, the fire would have caused less structure
loss. "The investigator discounted direct contact from flames
or radiant heat of the fire as being significant sources of ignition," Westhaver's report says. "Instead, it was concluded that
wind-driven embers were the most probable cause for the
majority of early home ignitions in the zone where the fire
made its transition from forest into urban neighborhoods."
Michele Steinberg, who heads NFPA's Wildfire Division, said
all wildfire prevention research backs up the notion that saving
structures in wildfires doesn't come down to any one measure.
"It's a package deal," she said. "It's the home itself and everything around it that's going to drive the potential for ignition.
If you've got a well-prepared lawn with a lot of defensible space
that's been cleared of vegetation, but you have some junk vehicles next to your house or an aging wood roof or spaces where
embers can get trapped, it is definitely a problem."

Not just a Western problem
With the Conference & Expo in Boston this year, Shew and
Westhaver will try to appeal to a crowd that includes fire
service members from the East Coast, where wildfire has
not traditionally been seen as a major threat. But Shew and
Steinberg were quick to point out that misconception, and
that wildfire should be
on the radar of everyCONFERENCE
one in the fire service.
SESSIONS
"Just look at what
happened in Gatlinburg,"
Structure Loss in the
WUI: Why Do Losses
Steinberg said, referring
Continue to Rise
to the November wildfire
Despite Increased
Prevention Efforts?
that tore through EastMonday, June 5,
ern Tennessee, killing 14
11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
people and destroying
David Shew, CAL FIRE
or damaging over 2,400
Why Some Homes
structures. "Wildfire
Survived: Learning
from the Fort
is present in pretty
McMurray Wildland/
much every state in the
Urban Interface Fire
country."
Disaster
Tuesday, June 6,
Likewise, Shew
9:30-10:30 a.m.
pointed to wildfires in
Alan Westhaver,
ForestWise
states like Florida, New
Environmental
Jersey, and Maine. In
Consulting Ltd.
fact, he said, the most
devastating wildfire in
American history occurred in 1871 in Wisconsin. The Peshtigo
Fire killed over 1,000 people and scorched more than a million
acres of land as it roared through Northeast Wisconsin. It just
so happened that the blaze occurred on the same day as the
Great Chicago Fire and was overshadowed by it.
"There are so many examples of significant, catastrophic wildfires that have occurred outside of the West Coast," Shew said.
ANGELO VERZONI is a staff writer for NFPA Journal.

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