Yesterday I posted about the lack of climate change coverage in the US media. In light of that, I can’t think of a bigger, and also more ironic story, than this one: an entire city of 80,000 people, a boom town in the heart of the tar sands production fields in western Canada, has been evacuated by the Canadian government because of massive and rapidly advancing wildfires brought on by drought conditions.
Here are excepts from the Globe and Mail report, which contain eyewitness testimony from the evacuees, people I consider climate change refugees:
“There was smoke everywhere and it was raining ash. I’ve never seen anything like it,” [Shams Rehman] said after his family reached an evacuation centre in the resort town of Lac La Biche, Alta. “I just wanted to get out of that mess. I just wanted to get my family to somewhere safe.” […]
“People were driving everywhere – it was absolute chaos in town. There were people stuck in ditches, driving across the grass and on sidewalks,” Mr. Bickford said at the Lac La Biche evacuation centre. “You just couldn’t see two feet in front of your truck through all the smoke.”
It took them two hours to cover four kilometres. As they pushed south, through bumper-to-bumper traffic, he said he looked in his rearview mirror and all he saw was smoke.[…]
Radhika Shukla fled her home in Fort McMurray’s Parsons Creek neighbourhood.
“In downtown, the fire was on both sides” of the street, she said, just before her crew was taken to the old retirement home in Lac La Biche. […]
Cassie White, 19, said she feared for her life as she tried to flee the area, only to be turned around near Gregoire, near the south end of Fort McMurray.
“On the left was a big gas station. The flames jumped over the highway and blew up the gas station. It was torched,” said Ms. White, who was making her way to Edmonton with her boyfriend. “People were driving on the shoulder. There were flames maybe 15 feet high right off the highway. There was a dump truck on fire – I had to swerve around it – and there was a pickup truck on fire as well. The entire trailer park on my right was in flames. Roofs were coming down.”[…]
Late Tuesday afternoon, municipal Councillor Allan Vinni said a significant portion of the Abasand Heights neighbourhood in Fort McMurray had been lost. He was in the area as the fire approached, trying to help an employee and her daughter get out.
He saw a wall of flames almost 12 metres high only a block away from his car. They were fortunate to get out in time.
“I’m covered in ash here,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s still burning like hell up there.
This is, once again, uncharted territory, reminiscent of the forced evacuation of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. The fires became so extreme and unpredictable that a Canadian wildfire information officer told reporters that, “it isn’t safe for firefighters to be on the ground.” And now, a prosperous boom town, largely thanks to the extraction of fossil fuels from local tar sands, is likely gone for good. It should be noted the oil and gas workers at those nearby tar sands facilities were part of that exodus.
Some oil and gas companies said they would reduce output and downsize their staffing plans in response to the blaze.
Suncor Energy Inc. (NYSE:SU), a top Canadian oil producer, said it was reducing production at its regional facilities to “allow employees and their families to get to safety.” The Calgary-based company’s plant is located about 16 miles north of Fort McMurray and is “in a safe condition,” it said in a statement late Tuesday.
Nexen, a subsidiary of the China National Offshore Oil Corp., was working on a modified staffing plan at its nearby Long Lake oil sands project, a Nexen spokeswoman told Bloomberg.
My what a measured response to what one resident described as like Armagedon. Of course, most of Alberta, a province roughly the size of Texas, was placed on a high fire alert two days ago, when a “total of 31 wildfires [were] burning across Alberta, with two considered out of control on Tuesday afternoon.” Oh, and did I mention the province is in the midst of a heat wave with temperatures in the mid 80’s F?
Perhaps the cable TV shows, between infomercials for non-stop coverage of Clinton and Trump, will find the time to report about this disaster. My guess is they might give it a 60 second spot during their non-peak viewing hours, since prime time is, of course, reserved for more important topics like whether Cruz voters can be convinced to hop on the Trump bandwagon, or why hasn’t Bernie Sanders just ended his damn campaign, already.
Odds are that if they do air any coverage of this story, they won’t bother to make the connection to global warming and climate change brought about by the very products that made Ft. McMurray a wealthy town before drought, high temperatures and high winds created the conditions for eradicating it yesterday. Which, as we all know, would be par for the course in America, the least educated, least informed nation regarding the ongoing climate crisis. Yay for American exceptionalism. Anywhere else in the world people are making the connection between these extreme events and climate change, even in the Vatican. Here? It’s just some more weird weather. God sure has a funny sense of humor, eh?
