Firestorm by Edward Struzik

Author:Edward Struzik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Uldis Silins was, at one time, one of those underappreciated forest hydrologists. Not anymore. He was in his office at the University of Alberta in Canada when he got a call in early May 2016, shortly after the Fort McMurray wildfire ignited in the forest 3.7 miles (6 kilometers) south of town. The call was from Dr. Ronald Reid, the drinking water quality regulator with the Alberta government. That initial conversation led to a series of one-on-one conference calls with various people in government to assess the immediate risks and determine what could be done to prevent what happened in Colorado in 1996, 2002, and in 2012 and in California in 2013.

“I had forty-four emails in my inbox that day,” Silins recalled. “A series of first-order and second-order assessments and actions were scoped out. Over the next several days, meetings and conference calls laddered this information into a broader group of government organizations dealing with immediate assessment and planning issues for this fire.”

Monica Emelko was one of the first people Silins called. It was Mother’s Day. The American-born, University of Waterloo engineer was at Florida’s Disney World with her children. Still rebounding from a five-year bout with cancer, Emelko hesitated only for a moment before she accepted the invitation to come to Fort McMurray.

Emelko and Silins are Canada’s version of Marc Edwards, the American environmental engineer who has spent a good part of his career exposing the breakdown of America’s aging waterworks in cities such as Washington, DC, and Flint, Michigan. Unlike Edwards, who investigates contaminants like lead that are already in the system, Emelko and Silins specialize in preventing contaminants from getting in.

Like Denver, San Francisco, and most modern North American cities, Fort McMurray has a state-of-the-art water treatment plant with the ability to deal with chemicals and harmful pathogens. The inevitable overload of dissolved carbon and sediment coming from a big fire burning just a few hundred feet upstream of the intake pipes, however, has the potential to interfere with the disinfection process, just like plugging the drain of a dishwasher. When that happens, water quality can change rapidly, to the point at which it becomes extremely dangerous. Carbon reacts with chlorine and produces undesirable chemical by-products, including known and suspected carcinogens. No one working at the treatment plant had the expertise to deal with a public health threat such as that.

Silins and Emelko flew up to Fort McMurray. They collected water samples upstream of the plant, surveyed the burn area by helicopter, and then met with senior water treatment operator Guy Jette and his crew to discuss the challenges they were already facing and the ones they would likely confront down the road when it finally rained.

Jette was his own media story. He was there from the very beginning when fire and smoke surrounded the water treatment facility shortly after the entire town was evacuated. He and nine others stayed behind, working twenty-hour shifts to make sure water would get to the firefighters in town. They slept on the floor and ate days’ old lunches that had been left behind in the refrigerator.

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