US Sends Troops to Canada to Fight Unstoppable 'Gigafire' - Videos
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Tens of millions of Americans are bracing themselves for another round of smoky days thanks to an unprecedented wildfire outbreak across Canada that forestry experts say is effectively impossible to stop at the moment.
On Tuesday, nearly 70 million people in a vast stretch of territory across 32 US states from Montana to Maine and Georgia were under some kind of warning about air quality thanks to fine particulate matter in the air, which has worsened since winds changed over the weekend.
More thick smoke from Canada’s wildfires moving into the Midwest United States today 💨 pic.twitter.com/GiI9fRRUWl
— Zoom Earth (@zoom_earth) July 15, 2023
By Monday night, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was recording some of the worst air quality in the country in Midwest cities like Billings, Montana, and For Wayne, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio, where the agency issued "red" air quality alerts indicating unhealthy air for everyone, not just the most vulnerable.
“We are acutely aware that the recent weather events prominently impacting our City this summer are the direct result of the climate crisis,” Chicago Mayor Mayor Brandon Johnson said on Monday. Air quality in the midwestern city was so bad that alerts were sounded warning children, elderly residents, and those with asthma or heart or lung vulnerabilities to limit their time outdoors.
British Columbia continues to impress. Numerous fires are still burning in the province as fire weather persists into summer. #wildfire #canada #Vancouver
— The Hotshot Wake Up (@HotshotWake) July 13, 2023
Another MASSIVE resource order to Canada is being fulfilled by U.S. resources and some have already mobilized.
A province… pic.twitter.com/85yx8TnRBb
The smoke is being blown south and east from more than 900 wildfires raging across Canada, which have together consumed more than 25 million acres of land - an area nearly the size of the US state of Ohio.
“It’s no understatement to say that the 2023 fire season is and will continue to be record-breaking in a number of ways,” Michael Norton, a director general with Canada’s Northern Forestry Center, told reporters earlier this month.
“The total area burned now exceeds any year on record since we started measuring and keeping accurate records,” he said.
Most of the fires are concentrated in northern Quebec, northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the southern Northwest Territories, according to government maps.
The region has been struck by its worst-ever heat, with the thermometer in the Northwest Territories reacting 100 degrees Fahrenheit near the Arctic Circle on Saturday. According to experts, it is the hottest temperature ever recorded north of 65 degrees latitude in the Western Hemisphere.
“In the scope for us, in the states, this would be one of the largest fires to occur – ever … It’s a gigafire,” Zac Krohn, a division supervisor with the US Forest Service, told firefighting crews in northern Quebec.
According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center, some 580 of those fires are “out of control.” Ottawa has sought international help taming the blazes, with fire crews coming from the US, South Korea, South Africa, Portugal and several other countries.
However, the hot, dry summer has created conditions in which taming the fires is nearly impossible, forcing firefighting teams to concentrate on delaying tactics to give residents time to escape the flames.
“When it’s the year to burn and the conditions are right, it’s just going to continue to burn. The best thing we can do as an incident management team is to focus on protection of people and communities,” said Matt Rau, an incident commander with the US’ Southwest Area Incident Management Team.
The smoke has come to the northern US just as a heat wave is baking the country’s central and southern regions in near-deadly heat. A “heat dome” of stagnant high pressure has brought record highs to infamously hot locales such as Death Valley, California, which reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday and Las Vegas, Nevada, which reached 117 Fahrenheit that same day.
The lengthy heat and humidity has helped heat the Gulf of Mexico up to near-jacuzzi temperatures, which meteorologists have warned could easily become fertile fuel for hurricanes passing overhead. Fortunately, the US National Hurricane Center is only tracking one tropical disturbance at the moment: Tropical Storm Don, located in the mid-Atlantic Ocean west of the Azores.
Worldwide, record-high temperatures have been shattered, and the planet recently experienced its hottest days in the last 120,000 years.
