Inside the NWT’s 2023 wildfire decision-making

It was hard, at first, to spot the new smoke through the old smoke. 

The fire that would eventually cause the largest evacuation in the history of the Northwest Territories may well have been missed in its first days, in June 2023, because of smoke billowing out of the Dehcho region to the southwest. 

The Dehcho fires had been burning for a month, the shock troops of an invasion that, by the fall, would burn an area the size of Switzerland.

Emerging through that smoke, a young fire given the name ZF15 was born from a lightning strike at the top of a triangle made up of a line drawn between Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀, then stretching up in two converging 60-km lines at the top. Over the next three months it would burn more than half of that triangle’s area in fits and starts, hurtling south toward the highway and west toward Behchokǫ̀, then, like a cornered animal, turning back toward the east and Yellowknife. 

The fire broke through line after line of defence, natural and manmade alike. In the end, only the mercy of rain stopped it besieging the near-empty territorial capital.

The story of ZF15 and its southern cousin, SS52, which tore through the South Slave region with unimaginable speed and ferocity, can help to explain the changing nature of fire in the North and across the country. 

Cabin Radio brought questions about 2023’s fire season to leading experts in fire management and climate scientists, to understand how it got so bad and whether the people and governments of the Northwest Territories can do anything better to prepare for the next one.

If there was one thing every expert we contacted could agree on, it was that there will be more bad years to come. To the south, that’s coming true in record time: as of this week, the Alberta fire season has already begun. 

“I can’t overstate the urgency of the risk that we face now,” said John Vaillant, whose book about the 2016 Fort McMurray fire, Fire Weather, has become essential reading in the new era of human-accelerated wildfires. 

“This will be Canada’s reality for the rest of our lives.” 

How a horrific summer began

Like many people across Western Canada, Marc-André Parisien had some Yellowknifers living at his place for a while this summer.

Parisien is a scientist at the Canadian Forest Service, the academic powerhouse of fire research in Canada, and his home in Edmonton was a convenient landing place for people who had just been told to pack up and get out along with 20,000 others. 

He wasn’t particularly surprised to see 2023 become what it became: a year where more area burned across the country than ever before in recorded history, forcing two-thirds of NWT residents out of their homes. 

“We knew this was coming to our country, and this year we really got quite a dose of it,” Parisien said. That’s not to understate how unusual it was, however. “We have a dataset of wildfires in Canada that spanned over 50 years. There was one single fire in there that spanned a million hectares. This year we had two – just this year. Almost three.”

A lot of factors conspired to make 2023 such a bad year for fires across the territory; to make ZF15 so capable of eluding fire crews’ attempts to corner it; to make SS52 move with such speed.  From huge stockpiles of fuel in the form of unburned forests, to challenging logistics in a vast territory, the landscape of the NWT is already a very hard place to fight a fire.

But the most significant factor is one that everyone could feel: it was a very hot summer. 

The planet is warming, and the NWT is warming at three or four times the rate of the rest of the world. That warming has obvious and less obvious effects.

A subtle but critical change is that the warmer it gets, the more lightning will be generated by friction from moving air masses.

Globally, lightning accounts for less than five percent of fire ignitions, and across Canada, about half. But in the NWT, “it’s far away the biggest source of ignition,” explained Mike Flannigan, an eminent scholar of fire who spent much of his career at the Canadian Forest Service. While it’s still rarer in the North than in the south, lightning is striking more and more often in the NWT, where, in 2023, lightning caused nine times as many fires as humans did. 

That means fires aren’t just starting near highways or towns, where cigarette butts might be carelessly tossed from a car, or an ATV exhaust pipe might overheat. They can happen anywhere, at any time, as long as conditions are right – and increasingly it’s striking where, and when, there’s enough dry fuel to start a fire.

That’s a change most northerners can relate to: the fire season has begun sprawling out across seasons that previously would have been too wet or too cold to allow fire to flourish.

The first fire of the year started on May 4 near Fort Smith. The average daily high in Fort Smith as far back as records go is 12C; on May 4, 2023, it reached 23.3C.

Flannigan has been studying fire since the 1970s. “I don’t recall a May fire season in the territories,” he said.

Those high temperatures dragged on into June. By June 28, when ZF15 started, conditions were so perfect that eight new fires started that day in the North Slave region alone, according to a summary of the summer’s fire reports prepared for Cabin Radio by NWT fire information officer Mike Westwick. 

One of those eight fires, ZF9, was so close to Wekweetì – just two kilometres – that the community was evacuated the next day.

‘Impossible to get to all of them’

Not every fire needs to be attacked, because not every fire is a problem. 

Fire is a natural part of the landscape, just like predators or parasites or windstorms: natural systems have evolved to cope with and even depend on fire. It clears out deadfall and tangled growth, cycling nutrients, leaving room for young plants to grow, and making it easier for animals to move through the landscape, among many other benefits. It also reduces future risk of fire. 

Most of the triangle between Yellowknife, Behchokǫ̀, and ZF15’s starting point hadn’t burned for decades, fire maps show. That was exacerbated by a “buildup index” (a measure of how much fuel is dry and available to burn) firmly in extreme territory by late June.

Aside from the long-term benefits of letting some fires burn, there’s also a practical reason behind this thinking: even if it were the right thing to do, it’s simply not possible to attack every fire.

“There’s so many fires igniting at once, you’re overwhelmed; it is impossible to get to all of them while they’re small,“ Parisien said. 

And by “small” he really does mean small. According to Flannigan, once a fire reaches the size of a soccer pitch, the game is over. Putting out the fire is often out of the question. 

“You cannot put it out through direct attack. That’s a common misconception by the public, because they see lovely pictures of planes dropping retardant or water on fire. They think they’re putting it out,” he said. “You may as well be spitting on a campfire.”

At that point, all that can be done is to try to limit the fire’s spread, hope it doesn’t cross through your barriers, and wait. 

That’s why, for Rick Olsen, the NWT’s manager of fire operations, the priority was not the little wisp of a fire 60 km from both Behchokǫ̀ and Yellowknife, but rather the fires burning within sight of communities, like the one on Wekweetì’s doorstep.

It’s a constant calculation in the fire management world: with limited resources, which fires need to be attacked and which can be left to burn? 

Reducing fuel loads on the landscape this way – letting fires burn through that fuel when they’re not threatening communities or other values, like cabins or infrastructure – is a strategic part of managing fire, one that all experts contacted for this story agreed is the right approach when possible.

That wasn’t always the case. Parisien said the debate was “pretty vitriolic” when he first arrived at the Canadian Forest Service in the early 2000s but, in recent years, the matter has been settled: not every fire can or should be put out. 

“We have to essentially work our way through finding that balance between knowing which fires we have to action and which fires are actually of a benefit, both for the ecology as well as for the safety of people,” Olsen said.

When attention turned back to ZF15, which was by then quickly becoming the biggest fire in the region, Olsen’s team elected to send a group of “ignition specialists” – fire starters. Their job was to scout opportunities to cut off future sources of fuel by lighting their own controllable fires in choke points created by lakes and already-burned areas. It worked, at least for a time. 

As with water bombers, there’s a belief that fire breaks are a way to stop a fire dead in its tracks. By clearing a broad strip of land, the thinking goes, the fire reaches the edge of a fire break and starves. 

But that’s not how a major fire spreads. 

“When you get strong winds – and when you get fire that’s crowning and putting off smoke columns that are 10,000, 20,000 feet up into the air and embers that are the size of your forearms are flying four or five kilometres – a fire break in and of itself is not going to prevent that type of stuff,” Olsen explained. 

Even fire breaks like those that would later be dug out of the forest around Yellowknife, 100 metres wide or more and kilometres long, won’t stop a fire of the intensity the territory saw in 2023. That summer, even the much larger, liquid, natural fire breaks of the NWT’s rivers weren’t enough. 

“We had a fire jump the Mackenzie River south of Tsiigehtchic,” Olsen said. “We had a fire jump the Great Bear River just by Tulita. We had the fire jump the Hay River as it went past Enterprise. We had a fire jump the Slave River maybe 30 kilometres north of Fort Smith.”

Where the fire jumped the Mackenzie River, it’s more than a kilometre and a half across; there is no conceivable way that crews could ever hope to build a fire break as wide or as fireproof as a river. Even if they could, it would be pointless. A fire break is more useful as a base of operations, acting as a safe haven from which to launch other efforts. 

The fire breaks created by the ignition specialists bought the NWT some time. The delay, however, was only that. By the second week of July, a finger of fire reached south and poked through the already burned areas – “breaching anchor points which we would normally expect to hold,” Westwick explained in an email – and carried on toward the highway. Then the winds came. 

The fire in the North Slave region had already grown monstrous with the help of the heat (highs in Wekweetì had rarely dipped below 20C all month) as well as smoke that prevented air operations and an ongoing drought, all within that unburned triangle between Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀.

As ZF15 turned toward Behchokǫ̀, driven by 50 km/h winds from the northeast, crews were scrambling to burn some of the fuel in the fire’s path. But the back-burning effort had to be abandoned as the fire swept toward the hamlet, torching 15 cabins along the way. 

It overtook Rae on July 25, burning four more homes in the town itself before it could be held back with the help of the lake, specialized fire-retardant gels, and more back-burning. The fire wouldn’t progress any farther west but, at that same moment at the start of August, another fire was discovered 200 kilometres due south. Within days, it would eclipse ZF15 in size, speed, and destruction. 

Fighting the Enterprise fire

The Canadian Drought Monitor releases regular reports on the drought situation across the country. In August of 2023, the area between Kakisa and Enterprise was on the border between moderate and severe drought, multiplying the risk from fire. 

Part of the fire risk in a warm period of drought comes from the air itself.

“As the atmosphere warms, the ability of the atmosphere to suck moisture out of the fuel … increases almost exponentially with temperature,” Flannigan explained. The resulting dryness “leads to higher-intensity fires that are difficult to impossible to extinguish.” 

By the time anyone noticed SS52 on August 2, at three hectares it was already about five times the size of a soccer pitch. In other words, putting it out was already not an option. Crews attacked it anyway in an attempt to limit its growth, but it was futile. 

It was hot, it was dry, and it was windy. But the South Slave region is notable for its boggy ground, with peat marshes dotting the low-lying parts of the landscape. The spongy terrain created by ultra-absorbent sphagnum moss is home to woodland caribou, moose, black bears, wolves, spruce grouse, and dozens of other charismatic animal species. That peat used to be fire-resistant – but that’s no longer always the case, explained David Andison, a landscape ecologist.

“You have fuel that didn’t used to be fuel. But now it’s drying up,” Andison said. 

Kira Hoffman, a fire ecologist who has extensively studied peat fires, says those fires are particularly problematic from a management point of view. “Once you get a fire burning in sphagnum moss, it just burns really deeply,” she said. “It’s very difficult to put out.”

The area into which SS52 headed had barely burned over past decades, with fuel building up to dangerous levels. 

The fire devoured that dry fuel and was soon ready for much, much more. Two hours after crews started in on the fire, it had grown 40 times larger, and easterly winds were now pushing it toward Kakisa. 

Just as in the early days of ZF15, smoke prevented some of the aerial attack. Planes and helicopters have to swoop down unusually low to hit a fire with their loads and have any effect. When too much smoke is in the air, it’s not safe to do so. 

At night, fires would typically calm down as the temperature drops and the humidity rises. Especially in times of drought, that’s not as dependable today as it once was. Increasingly, fires are growing through the night.

New technology lets helicopters fight fires at night, but Alberta is currently the only province to have such a machine – and Olsen said there was enough trouble just finding helicopters, period, let alone those advanced enough to work at night. 

Despite the limitations, crews managed to save Kakisa before the winds shifted. That was when the situation got out of control. 

Winds were forecast to reach dangerous levels, gusting to 50 or 60 km/h from the northwest, pushing the fire quickly toward Enterprise. What happened instead on August 13 was much worse.

“I don’t think anything could have prevented that wind event from doing what it did,” Olsen said. 

“What we wound up seeing was winds from the west which were clocked as high as 90 km/h, and sustained at a much-higher-than-forecast speed,” Westwick wrote. 

Flying became impossible in blackened skies. Crews could not be safely put in the path of a fire moving so quickly. Conditions more than doubled the “worst-case forecasting,” Westwick wrote, for how far the fire could get that day.

Hay River, Enterprise, and the Kátł’odeeche First Nation were evacuated for the second time that year as SS52 raged toward Great Slave Lake from two directions. The fire came within a brisk five-minute walk of the new, $50-million Hay River hospital. Remaining staff were ushered out of the town in military jets. 

Enterprise was burned, essentially, to the ground, like Lytton, BC before it. Unlike Lytton, there was no loss of life.

Fire Weather author Vaillant chalks that up, in part, to luck. 

“What Canada does not realize yet is how lucky it’s been,” Vaillant said. “There’s no reason that [Enterprise] couldn’t have been Paradise, California or Lahaina, Hawai’i.” 

One person was killed as a direct consequence of the NWT’s worst-ever fire season: firefighter Adam Yeadon of Fort Liard was hit by a falling tree as he worked to defend his own community that July. 

Which fires you fight, when, and how

Fighting fires is a matter of resource distribution: choosing where to send crews, in what numbers and with what equipment, and when. The wrong expenditure in the wrong place can mean overlooking a more pressing threat somewhere else.

“We always have to look at the potential for fire risks that might start somewhere else,” Olsen explained. “Do you put your eggs all in one basket? Put 20 crews on one fire, leave seven communities unprotected?” 

In the summer of 2023, more than 1,000 people were at work fighting fires in the NWT, many from outside the territory and the country. That’s not counting the community volunteers and armed forces members who would be deployed as well.  

By midsummer, with major fires burning near all of the major population centres of the territory (even Inuvik), those resources were being stretched to the maximum. It was costing $10 million a week to manage the incredible logistical feat of moving those thousand-plus people across the territory, supplying them, and preventing worse disasters, and the bill would eventually come to around $100 million – more than double what had been budgeted, and approximately equivalent to what the territory spends annually on all schools outside Yellowknife. 

Even so, residents were seeing what amounted to chaos around them as communities evacuated. People asked questions about why the wildfire response was happening this way and whether things should be done differently.  

Then-environment minister Shane Thompson commented in the Legislative Assembly in late September: “We have heard from some people that wildfires are not managed like they used to be 40 or 50 years ago, and that with more initial attack, we would have avoided the worst of this.”

Thompson went on to argue that reliance on extinguishing fires early is, historically, part of the problem. Parisien agrees.

“That thinking is what got us in trouble,” Parisien said. The buildup of fuels from previous generations’ more aggressive firefighting approach left Behchokǫ̀, Kakisa, Enterprise, Hay River, the Kátł’odeeche First Nation and Fort Smith more vulnerable than they needed to be, with what amounted to kiln-dried wood piles stacked around them. 

In mid-August, the same buildup meant the rest of the Behchokǫ̀-Yellowknife triangle was ripe for attack from a newly invigorated ZF15 as the winds wheeled around to the west.

Once again, the skies darkened, blotting out the ability for air-based action against the fire. Two other fires near the city added to the mess; wind from multiple directions, in the absence of rain, would threaten the city. With projections showing ZF15 could reach Yellowknife by the weekend, on Wednesday, August 16, the GNWT ordered residents to evacuate by Friday. 

That decision has undergone considerable analysis, some of which is ongoing. Moving 20,000 people over hundreds of kilometres along a single road out of the territory is a risky move at the best of times, on top of the normal difficulties of any evacuation, which, Vaillant pointed out, “can create its own disaster.” That’s leaving aside the fact that the fire was, at that moment, burning on both sides of the highway. Miraculously, no one was killed or injured in the evacuation itself. 

Clearer air (which allowed aircraft to work again) and rain returned just in time to save the community, Westwick wrote, halting it within 15 km of Yellowknife. 

What we could do now or next time

Had the fire reached Yellowknife, there were several lines of defence: crews in the air and on the ground, fire breaks to buy some time and, behind the fire breaks, sprinkler systems to dampen surfaces and put out embers as they landed, preventing “spotting” if fire rained down on the city. 

Firefighters and volunteers stood ready to jump on any fires that broke out behind those lines.

“Most of the risk communities could experience is going to come from spotting. So literally tens or hundreds of thousands of embers coming down on the community like a rain, and anything that’s capable of burning has the potential to burn,” Olsen said. 

To make that less likely, Olsen and others urged people to firesmart their homes.

Firesmart principles were developed in 1993 with the “wildland urban interface” in mind. (That’s what Yellowknife is, surrounded as it is by combustible, undeveloped land.) The principles come down to trying to limit the amount of fuel around homes and buildings so spot fires have less of a chance to light them up, and include things like clearing a 1.5-metre “non-combustible zone” around the house and deck, cleaning gutters to prevent buildup of flammable leaves and mosses, cutting grass and weeds, and keeping firewood away from the house. 

“It’s easy to do, it’s cheap to do, and it can reduce the flammability of your home by double-digit percentages. I’m a big fan,” Vaillant said. 

Directly beyond the communities of the NWT, there are huge buildups of unburned fuel. Hoffman, the fire ecologist, says that is not how First Nations of the North would have traditionally managed their communities’ fire risk.

“Burning was done kind-of right from the doorstep in the past and still is in many communities today,” she said. She works with communities like Gitanyow in BC, where residents value prescribed burns for fire risk management or other purposes like improving berry harvests. But today, conducting a prescribed burn is much more complicated than it would have been before colonization. 

“You have to go through a lot of hoops in order to get these burns happening,” she said. Smoke and its increasingly clear health impacts, potential liability for escaped fires – plus an understandable aversion to seeing fires burning on the edge of one’s home community – can make prescribed burning an unpopular idea.

Last year, there were only 23 burns approved in all of BC. It can take years to get a permit for a single burn.

As a result, Parisien says prescribed burning, which could limit the intensity and frequency of wildfires near communities, is “massively underused” in Canada. Vaillant agrees.

“We need help here, and there’s a whole tradition and a wealth of knowledge that’s been ignored, repressed, disrespected, that we’d be well-advised to return to,” he said. 

Westwick said there were two prescribed burns in the NWT last year, one near Inuvik and one near Fort Simpson, the latter part of a training exercise. Plans for 2024 are still in the works. 

The Dene Nation, which has repeatedly called for a public inquiry into last year’s events, wants Dene traditional knowledge to be incorporated into wildfire response, since the Dene have “always relied on our own understanding of the land and the environment around us to maintain a healthy lifestyle.” 

They’re not alone in their demand for a review into wildfire management.

Residents of Enterprise and Fort Smith have also called for an inquiry, and MLAs will shortly vote on whether to endorse such a measure. Internal reviews are happening at the Department of Environment and Climate Change, Department of Municipal and Community Affairs and the City of Yellowknife, where independent contractors will look at lessons learned. The territorial government has said those existing reviews should be enough. 

Whether the territory makes changes to its approach or not, the land itself is changing under them. 

The area between Enterprise and Kakisa that lit up in the first days of August was in the Taiga Plains ecozone, a kind of forest Diana Stralberg has been studying for its relationship to fire. What she has found is this forest type is in the process of a profound shift to something much more southern-looking and grassier. 

“I started getting into projecting future fire and I think at that time, there was really a lot of skepticism, like, ‘Oh, this must be too extreme.’ I feel like increasingly, as we’ve started to observe the impact of these – especially after the last couple of fire seasons – people are starting to see this shift,” said Stralberg, a University of Alberta researcher. 

Forest types are changing because of the severity of fires and, in turn, the fires are changing too. They’re coming more frequently and burning younger forests.

While governments debate their response, just outside Hay River – in the blackened forest where the drought has now widened in area and grown to extreme levels, and where the cold and snow that once kept fires at bay is increasingly absent – smoke is still rising from the ground. 

“Essentially,” Olsen said, “We’re still firefighting in the winter.”