What’s on Dec? | Episode 22 | Wildfire trends and modelling challenges

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Featuring:  

Glenn McGillivray
Managing Director,
Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR)

The 2023 Canadian fire season broke records from an area burned perspective and 2025 is already off to a roaring start, surpassing the second-worst year on record.

It’s unclear how the rest of the season will play out, but resiliency and mitigation efforts go a long way in protecting properties from wildfire damage, says What’s on Dec? podcast guest Glenn McGillivray, managing director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Glenn provides his perspective on why wildfire risk is so difficult to model.

He shares some minor ‘tweaks’ that can make homes less flammable. Plus, he talks about communities taking interesting approaches to wildfire resiliency.

He also explores some general wildfire trends, such as strained staffing resources for wildland firefighters and shifting fire season dates in Canada.

Audio transcript 

Intro | Jason Contant: 

Hi, my name’s Jason Contant. I’m associate editor at “Canadian Underwriter” and host of our podcast series, “What’s On Dec?” On June 23rd, I spoke with Glenn McGillivray from ICLR about wildfire trends. We discussed why wildfire is so difficult to model, how this year compares to other fire seasons, and what clients can do to help mitigate these perils.

Jason Contant: 

As is the case every year, there’s been a bunch of wildfires, you know, and evacuations across the country. I think early on it seemed like, you know, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were in the news a lot, but, of course, wildfire is a national issue. So if we get right into it, you know, keeping in mind that we’re recording this on June 23rd, so it’s still relatively early in the fire season, but, Glenn, you know, what I’m wondering is, how does this year compare so far with 2023, which, from what I understand, that was the worst fire season on record in Canada.

Glenn McGillivray:

Right, 2023 was indeed a really bad year for area burned. Absolutely blew all the records out of the water. This year got off to a roaring start. There was some projections that it might be the worst year ever. Of course, it’s way too early to tell, but we have surpassed the second worst year already for area burned. Things have cooled down a little bit out west. We’re not hearing as much in the news right now about some, you know, big fires in places that were being affected a few weeks ago, but got a lot of months to go. We’ll have to see how it unfolds.

Jason Contant: 

If we sort of shift gears here in terms of like wildfire modeling, I hear that it’s very difficult to model, right? And so are you able to say why it’s difficult to model and what we need to do to change this in effect?

Glenn McGillivray:

I can kind of speak in generalities. And there are several things I think that are going on. So, if I want to model an earthquake, for example, I know where the fault lines are. I know where the risk is. It doesn’t really change radically over time. It’s pretty static. Flood changes, it changes fairly reg, well, not regularly, but, you know, over a period of several years it can change. But like I said before, I could look at a flood map, and I can tell you kind of where the water’s gonna go depending on how much of it there is and, you know, how fast it rains, or whatever it happens to be. Wildfire has some things that are set, like where the fuel is, for example, and terrain. Terrain plays a big role in wildfire, and terrain doesn’t change that much year after year. But the fire weather changes vary dramatically from day to day. Like, we’re not talking month to month or over 10 year, we’re talking like hours or a day the fire weather conditions can change: wind speed, temperature, all those sorts of things. That really makes wildfire difficult I think to model. If you look at the daily fire danger rating map that’s put out by the Forest Service, they’re all archived. So look at today’s map, look at yesterday’s, look at the day before, it won’t take very long for you to be able to see that, you know, the red and the blues and the greens and the yellows change really, really dramatically day to day. I’ve seen situations where the map is almost red right across the country and you’re going, “Oh my gosh, the hazard’s bad.” And then two days later it’s blue and cooled off again. So that’s one of the things that makes it really, really difficult I think to model is just that changeability of the weather. A couple of other problems that I hear about, and I know a little bit about, the burn models that are part of these models, I think tend to use vegetation burn models. Well, once embers enter in the community and start that community on fire and we start getting structure to structure spread and that sort of thing, it’s not a vegetation fire anymore. This is a structural fire. And so I don’t know if there are any, you know, wildfire models that kind of make that flip over from the vegetation burning model to the structural burning model. And we don’t know a lot about, you know, once embers enter into a community, how the fire propagates, how it spreads, what the patterns are, what the pathways are. We don’t know a lot about that. I think a lot of the weather data that goes into these models is the historic weather and not the future weather we’re going to get that’s supercharged by climate change. There’s a whole host of I think challenges that really, really make it difficult to model wildfire. And, yeah, it’s a tough one.

Jason Contant: 

In terms of general trends with wildfires or wildfire mitigation, is there anything you’re seeing?

Glenn McGillivray:

First of all, right across probably the world, wherever fire is a thing, we’re starting to see earlier fire seasons and fire seasons starting early and running late. In places like California, there’s some thinking that they’re moving or have moved to a 12-month fire season where they used to have, you know, a very defined fire season. It’s starting to spread kind of at great rate throughout the year. In Canada, we’re starting to see, you know, an earlier start to fire seasons, and the seasons running late. This past Christmas, January, February, we saw big fires in the northeastern United States and then Long Island, other places in New York, New Jersey, that would’ve been on pretty much unheard of just a few short years ago. And that, you know, probably fairly easily could have been across the border into Canada. So that’s one of the things, and this puts huge stress and strain on resources. It’s already tough enough to hire wildland firefighters now. There’s a lot of complaints about, you know, underpay and that sort of thing. But when you have an earlier start to the year and then it running later, that puts even more strain on these resources. So it’s really, really, really tough. The other big thing that we’re seeing is that not too long ago, in almost all cases, wildfire would settle down through the overnight period. So the sun would go down, things would cool off, it would get a little damper out, the humidity would pick up, the fire would die down a little bit. It wouldn’t grow as much, if at all. This gave crews a chance to have a break. Then they could regroup later, you know, the next morning and get back to it. We’re starting to see situations where the fires are not settling down in the overnight simply because of the dry conditions with drought and, excuse me, that sort of thing. So what that means is you almost need double the crews or you’re gonna be working your current crews really, really, really hard. So that’s tough. And the air crews are not allowed to fly over a certain number of hours per day. So what do you do there? We’re already having a problem with three tankers grounded in Ontario because there’s not enough crew. We need double the crew basically to be able to work fires overnight. Alberta has started to fight fires in the overnight. They’re only the second or third place in the world to do this. CAL FIRE in California started doing this a couple years ago, basically using night vision goggles to fight fire in the overnight. So you can just imagine the stress and strain putting on human resources as a result of these big, big changes. And it’s just an indication of how quickly the environment is changing and with climate change and that sort of thing as well. So those are kind of a couple of the big things we’re seeing. As I mentioned before, very common now to talk to a wildland firefighter and have them say, you know, “I’m a veteran. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve never seen fire behave like this before. It’s just crazy.” You know, in the 24 hours before Jasper burned, that fire ran 12 kilometers. It moved forward 12 kilometers. We had a wildfire in California that was growing by a football field every second. These are the types of numbers that are just blowing people away. Wildland fire researchers and practitioners are going like, “Wow, we’ve never seen this sort of behavior before.” Another thing to note is, as you said at the onset, wildfire is a national problem. Historically, we’ve had fire into Fredericton, New Brunswick, for example. We’ve had fires outside of Halifax every few years. And just a couple years ago we had a big one in Tantallon that, you know, burned some homes, but we never really thought of fire as an eastern issue. But lately we’re seeing some really, really big fires in the east. And this is not uncommon, it’s not totally strange, but it is new to some people who just really never thought of that eventuality. But the threat is there. And we’ve had fire enter into communities in Ontario, in Quebec, mentioned, you know, Fredericton in the 20th century burned pretty good. You know, this year, last year, the year before, we’ve had fires in certain places in Newfoundland and Labrador. This year really early to have fires up in the high north there. So early, but still. So that eastern problem fire problem, I hope is waking some people up to the reality that fire is indeed a national problem and hopefully it kind of helps FireSmart be that national program that it’s hoping to be, or working to be.

Jason Contant: 

You know, if I look sort of at resiliency, I know there was building code changes, you know, and they always take a while to come into effect, obviously. And I think there’s work being done to set up like an adaptation committee for the 2030 building code, if I’m not mistaken, like the national building code. So what I’m wondering is, what can we do in the meantime?

Glenn McGillivray:

Right, so that committee has been formed, as far as I know, and the work is beginning, and wildfire is one of two or three hazards that they’re going to look at. And there might be some consideration in the 2030 code. But in the meantime, we don’t need a code to build homes that are more resilient to wildfire. We know what needs to be done. They’re not radically different than the way we build homes now. We never talk about building bunkers at ICLR. We just talk about making little tweaks that in this case make a home less flammable. And that includes having a Class A roof cover on the home. And I just like read 10 minutes ago that, “Oh, we gotta put a metal roof on your home.” And that’s not true. Class A does incorporate metal, but it can also incorporate asphalt shingles, it can incorporate other different types of roof cover. And I think this might be a problem solving itself. It seems to me that most roof cover is Class A now as it is. Like, the vast majority of homes in Canada have asphalt shingle roofs, and most of those are class A. So I think this is kind of solving itself, which is good news. But the other part is deciding on the home. Anything but vinyl is fair. We advocate for things like cement fiberboard on the side of the home, or stucco, brick, stone, anything but vinyl. Vinyl is just bad news in the wildland-urban interface. And then we can talk about other things, like what you make your deck out of and vent screening sizes so embers can’t get into attics and different things like that. But the really big ones are the roof and the siding.

Jason Contant: 

So vinyl is the no-go basically. Is it just that it’s extremely flammable? Is that the issue with it?

Glenn McGillivray:

It melts at fairly low temperatures. So whereas, you know, aluminum may take 800 or 900 degrees Celsius to melt, vinyl melts at about 80 degrees Celsius. Then you expose the home to flames and embers and things of that nature. It’s toxic, it melts into the soil, it requires soil remediation. It’s just bad news all around. And, unfortunately, you know, after the Fort McMurray fire in 2016, the insurance industry stepped in and put everything back with vinyl siding again. So it’s just, it’s bad news. It’s also bad news, by the way, for hail as well.

Jason Contant: 

In terms of like mitigation efforts, has there been any headway over the years? Like, is there anything that we need to be doing differently?

Glenn McGillivray:

Well, there’s lots that we need to be doing differently. But in terms of headway, you can always point at little communities here and there that are doing some interesting work. Not enough of them, unfortunately. And we have a long way to go. We have a lot of exposure in Canada. By some estimates there’s over 60,000 small communities in the boreal forest that are directly exposed to wildfire. That’s just the boreal. It doesn’t include other forests and grasslands and things like that. So the exposure is huge, and we really have to get on with, well, something like a wildland-urban interface building code for one thing. And while we’re waiting for that, more voluntary measures, both from builders. You know, there’s nothing stopping builders from, you know, building a subdivision that’s more flame resistant. There’s one going up in Exshaw. There’s some examples of things being done, but we have a long, long, long way to go.

Jason Contant: 

Is there, like, in terms of a building code for wildfire, I dunno if you can talk about that, but is there sort of any headway? Or, you know, like, are we moving in that direction, or is it look like that’s not gonna happen?

Glenn McGillivray:

It’s really hard to say. You mentioned the 2030 code. So this is the first building code in Canada that will incorporate resilience, climate change resilience, into it. But we don’t know what that’s gonna look like. We don’t know how that’s gonna unfold. We don’t know if that’s going to, you know, be firm building code changes or what it’s going to mean. So we’ll have to see. There is the International Code Council has a wildland-urban interface building code. It’s used in places like California. We would really like Canada to be the first country to have such a code. We think there’s big call for it. It’s really important. But we’ll have to see how this 2030 code process kind of unfolds.

Jason Contant: 

What happens in situations when there’s repeat wildfires, right? Like, for example, Jasper, that was the costly one last year, right?

Glenn McGillivray:

Yeah.

Jason Contant: 

So what happens when there’s a wildfire again in the same location? And like you said, people build back with vinyl, for example. Like, what can be done in terms of building back better, I guess, in the same location?

Glenn McGillivray:

I hear a lot of people talk about we shouldn’t build in harm’s way in terms of flood and wildfire. So flood, I understand. I could look at a flood map, I can kind of tell you where the water’s gonna go depending on how much water there is and, you know, based on terrain and things like that. That’s not really possible to do with a wildfire. So when people say we shouldn’t build in harm’s way for wildfire, I look at them and say, “Well, what do you mean by that?” Because the boreal is a pretty big place. It’s like 60% of the landmass of Canada. Just about a month or so ago, maybe more, ICLR published their good, better, and best recommendations for construction. That includes for wildfire. Except, for wildfire, we don’t have good, better, and best. We have better and best because wildfire is a little bit different than the other hazards. People can die. We don’t see a lot of homes that were slightly damaged but, you know, we usually see either no damage or total loss. So rather than do good, better, best for wildfire, we did our better recommendations and our best recommendations, and those are on our website. And, you know, if there’s only one thing that you can do, get that area immediately around the house clear of flammables. That six feet around the home is so important. We’re talking about ornamental vegetation, landscaping vegetation that can ignite. And we’re talking about things like wood piles, wood fences connected to the home, wood piles, wood sheds, anything of that nature. I mean, if there’s only one thing that you’re able to do, that’s the thing you do. Get that area cleared immediately around the home. We’ve seen lots of homes survive intense ember storms just because there was nothing immediately around the home that could ignite. We see this all the time. And so that’s really, really important.

Jason Contant: 

Yeah, that’s a good takeaway for sure. And, you know, if I’m thinking like past, historical, for example, would you say are we more prepared for these perils now than we were in the past?

Glenn McGillivray:

I’d have to say not. There’s actually an article in the Toronto Star yesterday or today talking about how there are fewer wildland firefighters in Ontario this year. We’re seeing that across the country. Just for example, just one part of it, the suppression part of it is that we’re having HR issues with manning up, staffing up, our teams in Canada. This is one part of the problem. We have a lot of communities that are growing outward into the wildland-urban interface, so the risk is getting worse. The climate is getting worse. We keep hearing wildland firefighters say, you know, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, I’ve never seen a fire like that before. I’ve never seen fire do those things before.” We keep hearing that time and time and time again. So, unfortunately, Jason, I would say we’re not in a great position even though we’re getting a better understanding of where the risk is and things of that nature. As I said before, we have a long, long way to go.

Jason Contant: 

Are there any, I guess, leaders in wildfire mitigation? Like, are there certain provinces that are really active on the file or anybody who’s taking unique steps for example?

Glenn McGillivray:

Yeah, there are a number of communities I think that are doing some interesting work. First of all, on a bigger picture basis, there’s a lot of work going on where the high risk is. So in British Columbia, of course, there’s a lot of funds and funding put toward wildfire mitigation and suppression. And same with Alberta. As you start moving eastward, there’s less and less being done. But we’re starting to hear some rumblings that, you know, FireSmart is starting to make some inroads in east of Canada. So that’s good news. There are some communities that you can point to that are doing some interesting work. Canmore, Alberta is doing some interesting things. Fort McMurray has a really interesting rebate program. They’ll give you thousands of dollars as a homeowner to make your home more fire resilient, including thousands of dollars to change the siding on your home and things like that. So really interesting stuff. But one of the things just generally speaking we’re finding is that incentives aren’t working as well as we hoped they would. There are lots of communities in B.C., for example, that will pay for an assessment to be done in your home, a FireSmart assessment. A lot of those incentive programs aren’t being taken up, aren’t being used. There are some places that will go even further, remove brush from your property for free, for example, or let you use a chipper for free, all sorts of incentives, and they don’t really work that well. So it’s one of the things we’re trying to figure out at ICLR is how to make these incentives a little bit more useful. One of the funny things though is there are a lot of insurance companies in Canada that will give you money after you’ve had a basement flood. They’ll give you money to try to prevent it from happening again. And those programs have very poor takeup as well. So this is an example where people have had the loss, and you’re saying, “Well, here’s $2,000 to prevent it from happening again, put in a backwater valve,” and those programs, you know, have very poor participation.

Jason Contant: 

So I mean that’s really all the questions I had, Glenn, is there anything else you wanted to add?

Glenn McGillivray:

No, just to reiterate that, you know, we know how to build communities that are more flame resistant. We just really have to get on with it. I think we have a big focus in Canada is on thinning fuels in the wildlands. That’s a very expensive proposition. It’s very time consuming. There’s only a very small window in which you can do that work. You can’t do it in the middle of summer when it’s really hot. You can’t do it when your hip deep in snow. So there’s only a certain amount of time where you can thin fuels. Thinning fuels is not enough. We can’t just work from the wildlands and move towards communities. We have to work within the community and move outward. We have to start at the structure level, make structures more resilient. And then make neighborhoods and communities more resilient. And then we can work out into the wildlands. We have to get on with that work.

Outro | Jason Contant:  That wraps up today’s episode. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time on “What’s on Dec?”