Addison's Blog Issue #15: Fire Safety

 Canadian Geological Discoveries: Wild Fires

December 7, 2022

This week for Addison's blog, we will discuss the details of forest fires. Forest Fires are weather disasters that happen in the dry plantation area of the environment. These are one of the most dangerous situations that can happen in any dry forest due to their material being extremely flammable. What causes them and how they affect the environment are great questions, which is why we are going to explain them here in this blog.

So what causes a wildfire? Now sometimes it can either be started by lightning strikes in the skies, but this can only happen at certain points in time, depending on the weather. Research shows that about 10 to 20% of lightning strikes cause a fire to burst on the earth, after 100,000 hits from the storms.

 However, most of the wildfires are caused by what I call, "Human Error". This is because when people are careless, they can do things that make their surroundings a bit worse. For example, whenever someone goes camping, they have to be careful where to camp exactly, because in some forests, like the 1998 Silver Creek fire. Some safety measures are assured to provide extra protection for wildlife and humans as they interact with nature itself. 

Some of the ways fires can be put out are rain, but it requires lots of water to completely put out a fire depending on how big it gets. However, fires aren't the only situation to worry about. Smoke is another problem because it can pollute the atmosphere. In my experience as a scout, we actually smelled the air one morning at camp which smelled fairly bad due to the amount of smoke from a fire near our position. To protect your lungs, always wear a mask just in case the fire is too big.

Some of the locations where the fires have hit in Canada are the Yukon, Manitoba, Alberta, and some of the Northwestern parts of Canada. These fires have been formed on the western side of Canada in British Columbia, which is a strange coincidence, due to past research showing that it has a lot of impact from other disasters. 

A current event that actually happened in Canada was in Vancouver of British Columbia from June 30 to July 1 of last year when there were lightning strikes that happened more than 700,000 times. Due to increasing temperatures around 121 degrees Fahrenheit, in the Northeast section of British Columbia, the people of Lytton had to evacuate the village. The fire had burned up 90% of the town and had 719 deaths. 

This map above here is a weather conditional pattern that shows where the fires in Canada have mostly been set loose. The blue section means it's completely wet and no fires have been started. The red sections represent where there have been lots of fire.

Links: https://www.saobserver.net/opinion/column-careless-campers-can-raze-a-forest/ 

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/report

 https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/interactive-map

https://www.dosomething.org/us/facts/11-facts-about-wildfires

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/04/1013026434/canada-battles-more-than-180-wildfires-with-hundreds-dead-in-heat-wave