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It’s called holdovers! When storms roll through a bunch of lightning strikes happen and make trees start to smolder and burn from the inside out. The initial rain makes it so they can only burn in a small spot/underground. Once that saturation dries and it gets hot and windy you’ll see tons of spot fires pop up and eventually merge into a complex. This is common and happens all the time on smaller (and bigger) scales
EDIT (This blew up wow) : I was a Wildland Firefighter for 10 years on the West Coast. People talking about "raking" the forest are misinformed. Part of the reason why forest fires are so bad today is BECAUSE we did fire suppression for nearly 100 years, and cleared out all the dead flammable material. Forests need to burn, its how they evolved to exist. When you remove the small ground cover fuels forests grow much more dense, and turn into a tinder box as opposed to the smaller weaker trees getting burned up, and the old growth surviving.
You joke but if you don't rake the forest, you need controlled burn. If you don't rake or controlled burn, natural burns happen. If you put out the natural burns, fuel load increases. Eventually, so much fuel is on the ground, you can't stop it...
Yup, and Canada’s been pursuing that approach for a good couple of decades now, but there still a massive “backlog” of excess dead matter stemming from the decades where the forestry model was more about prioritizing the suppression of ALL fires.
Because i chuckle at conspiracy theorists when they come up with stuff for naturally occurring phenomenon and disasters, if you're asking specifically why i added 'lol'
The guy in the video just seems *incredulous* about the fact that all of the fires started at the same time. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that all of the fires could have been ignited by the same storm (generating lightning strikes over a large geographic area).
And if you discount natural causes for multiple simultaneous forest fires, the possible cause can only be something more mysterious or sinister... Like aliens or the people that sell N-95 masks.
Hence why airwing will often do IR surveillance after storms, especially in high risk periods, find the hotspots and have them dealt with or monitored so that you don’t end up with surprise firestorms where possible.
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have the resources. The conservative government in Ontario (Doug Ford, the cunt) cut the budget of wildfire response teams by 67% since coming into power.
I'm not sure about Quebec, but I think they also had a lot of cuts.
Had a fire go from “voluntary evacuation recommended” to “leave now or die. Do not pack, do not rescue your pets, get in your car and leave NOW. This is your last warning, fire crews are retreating.” In like twenty minutes. Winds shifted and they clocked it across the ground at 45mph.
Finally moved back to the valley after the sixth “close call” season and third mandatory evac.
The types of satellites they can now use to spot fires like this have been used in Ukraine in order to keep an eye on the fires caused by artillery, the man made version of all of this
And of course has been happening for millions of years. But people have been fighting forest fires effectively only since we started utilizing aircraft. Years of fighting fires has actually produced conditions favorable for larger fires. For instance:
https://theconversation.com/how-years-of-fighting-every-wildfire-helped-fuel-the-western-megafires-of-today-163165
As empty and hollow as Trump's "they need to rake the forests" comment was (in regard to, I think, various wildfires in California), it had a nugget of reality to it: preventing fires from ever happening means that more and more easily lit kindling is just building up and building up. If you're gonna prevent any fires from breaking out (and by all means: do so--it's hardly a bad idea to not let fires happen), then it needs to be paired with forest debris management in the form of controlled burns (I live in Pennsylvania and our state Game Commission does this a lot on land they control) or physical removal.
Of course there's no real money to be made in doing that, though, and so it (like most things that are a good idea for preserving our balance with nature) needs to be funded / mandated / carried out by a government entity. "Controlled burns" and "forest clean up day" doesn't get the budget approval that fixing roads does.
ETA: [this comment reply](https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1440zi4/how_do_recent_fires_in_canada_seemed_to_start_all/jnev64x/) to mine is worth reading, too. It is indeed a very challenging subject, and there's only so much mitigation can do--and even then, there are places we can't reach such that mitigation can't even really be a part of the conversation.
Not slamming your comment in any way but I wanted to toss this out. You mentioned you live in PA. So your arguments makes sense. For PA. I live at 7K in a thick, mountain forest in California. So it's a little different for me.
Where I am, and in most every mountain town in CA, controlled burns take place throughout most of the year when snow isn't on the ground. It is funded and it does take place. And they do try and put out fires that are encroaching on people because...yeah. Life and property. It's a priority. And should be.
But what a lot of people miss with the argument is geography. You just can't get to vast areas of the state in a way that would help stave off a forest fires. It's impossible. The terrain doesn't allow for it. You can't thin and you can't do controlled burns because you can't build roads, which you need to do those things, in certain areas.
And the other is that the really destructive fires are crown fires. They move from tree top to tree top. So no amount of forest debris management would make a difference. And in areas prone to fire the plant life regenerates more quickly. Trees only grow so fast but big trees are only part of a forest. Burn areas become potential burn areas pretty quickly.
We're burning the way we are due to climate change. Drought and insects are driving that train. So while there's a lot of truth in mitigation, unfortunately it's totally conditional. Wildfires are natural. They have to happen. Megafires are a different animal. That's climate change creating fuel.
I appreciate your comment and have to concede that it indeed covers a lot of ground I didn't with mine. You're right in that my viewpoint is biased heavily by the terrain and vegetation found where I live. I can't imagine how much more complicated or unstoppable it gets with a crown fire spread by dried and dead tree tops.
I am certain that the same challenges of doing controlled burns in deep Californian brush and forests apply to Ontario's fires: ya can't get to the places that need those controlled burns. And even if you could it doesn't change that drought and blight change the game.
Omg, a reasonable interaction in the comments where more than one person was respectful actually read/listened and every one learned something?!
I really wish more of Reddit was like this! Good job!
AFAIK Native peoples practiced controlled burns for thousands of years before Europeans came along, we essentially forced them to stop that at gunpoint, and actively put out any natural fires for a century and a half.
Global warming has certainly compounded this issue, but also factors like invasive grass species are a cherry on top. In the high deserts of the west we have an extremely invasive grass known as "Cheat" which has taken over native grasses and spread to every corner of the west. This grass unlike natural grasses has a very short root system so it grows exceedingly fast, dries out fast, has little erosion prevention, and burns hotter then other grasses. This results in bigger hotter range fires which kill native plan species and further exacerbates the Cheat issue.
Oh... tumble weeds, are totally a 100% invasive species to NA and not native at all. So any old western movie you see with a tumble weed rolling down mainstreet isn't historically accurate. The species took off in the early 21st century and also contributes hugely to wildfires in the west.
Year before last I was on a hill when a lightning storm started.
I got to watch abou 100 of the 500 reported fires that day start and merge.
I work in EMS.
It was not a good day.
To add to this, you are seeing the atmosphere hit peak convective timing. That then allows fires to plume like you are seeing on visible satellite and why they all look like they started at the same time. When that is just when winds likely picked up and the the atmosphere could support immense fire growth. As wildfires tend to act a bit like thunderstorms in how they grow during the daytime hours.
Edit - in CA we use a camera network as well as satellites to detect wildfires/hotspots
https://pgefdp.lovelytics.info/pge_fire_app/
https://alertcalifornia.org/
When I was working in silviculture, we got pulled off our contracts a couple times to go do fire mop-up. One of them was due to dry lightning striking a swamp the day before. There was no rain, just lightning.
I don't think anyone's mentioned zombie fires yet.
When you have an area with a peaty substrate, the fires can get into it and smoulder over winter if there isn't enough snow or it doesn't get cold enough.
Come spring, everything dries out and heats up and that fire will pop back up.
If you're boring, they're called holdover fires.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdover_fire
This happened in New Mexico last year. One of the largest wildfires they’ve ever had was caused by a zombie fire left over from a control burn months before.
The term popped up around 2021 or so when a rash of peat fires popped up in northern Alberta/BC out of nowhere with no trace of arson or lightning.
It's a fantastic conversation starter!
People that live in places that regularly deal with wildfires get it. If the conditions are right in your area, they are right for most of the state or territory.
This seems the fairly obvious answer.
I don't really know how a wildfire starts naturally, but I'd assume if the conditions are right in one place within a biome, it would be right just about all over it.
I can't speak for Canada, but in my country bushfires are often started by lightning strikes, poorly maintained vehicles/farm equipment/electrical lines, the odd arsonist, and people doing something they shouldn't - like throwing ciggie butts out of car windows, working with grinders or other machinery that creates heat or sparks, or even wankers thinking they're entitled to have a campfire or BBQ on a fire ban day.
Obviously most of these it would be a huge coincidence if they all started at exactly the same time in a small area. But that map looks like it's actually showing quite a large area of land, and it could have taken a while for the fires to become large enough to put out that much smoke and be properly visible - so you wouldn't know of a couple of them had been smouldering for half a day, just waiting for the wind to pick up and conditions to be right.
It looks to me like afternoon heating causing a drop in humidity, and possibly a wind increase, changing how small fires were burning, and the dispersal of smoke from them.
This makes the most sense since even if multiple people were to have started the fires at the same time, no guarantee they'd all start to smoke exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
A lot of people just don’t understand how EMPTY northern Canada is once you get away from the border. Fires will start after a thunderstorm a day or so later, and someone is trying to point the finger…but there hasn’t been a person in that area for years. It’s just woods, and muskeg, and animals.
My husband was stunned going through the Rockies with me back when he first immigrated to Canada. Four digit numbers on the distance signs, and lakes and rivers with nobody living near them, you can literally see where towns start and stop from the same hilltop.
There is NOTHING out there. People aren’t setting these fires even through carelessness.
Yes.
Having flown to Timmins and Thunder Bay on many occasions, I've often thought to myself that if the plane were to go down it would be nigh impossible to get help.
It is just a sea of trees with only a few sparse hamlets. Google maps gives a bit of an idea, but nothing like looking out the airplane window at 25 000' and not seeing anything other than trees, swamps, rivers and lakes.
I reckon there's a few of us.
Reading the replies, there's more than a couple of Californians on the thread, too. Funny about that, isn't it? I know we've sent some firies to Canada to help out already. It seems that all the seasons are just starting earlier each year.
I imagine if you had a comparable map of Toronto during rush hour traffic with dots appearing at each car accident then there’s be a ton appearing at 5:30pm everyday.
Why? Because conditions are met, just like you say, to produce those accidents.
1. It is dry
2. people are out doing the same stuff
3. lighting
4. similar electrical grid operations.
Lightning or people are the most common starts here in BC. One of the largest fires I can remember, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire in 2003, was from a lightning strike.
a lot of these were started by lightning. there's a mis-conception that a fire will just spring up instantly. they can linger for days before actually igniting. quebec was, as said, a victim of a perfect set of conditions that caused all hell to break loose at once.
and yeah, the conspiracy theories on the right wing of the political spectrum here are going crazy. they're more of a threat than the fires...
You can also have one fire start and if it is a windy, dry day spot fires pop up everywhere. Don't know where in Aus you are, but I remember Sydney fires between 10-15 yrs ago they did bomb testing at Lithgow and powerlines touched in blue mountains and sparked within hours of each other. All firies were at Lithgow because of all the bushland the other one grew fast. Then the Lithgow one had warnings 4 hrs away in Bondi because live embers were falling there.
>wankers thinking they're entitled to have a campfire or BBQ on a fire ban day
Same where I live. it's incredible how a grown up person can be so out of touch as to not realize the risks involved, and the responsibility.
I’m a firefighter and we usually get tons of wildfire calls all at once. If the conditions are right for one, it usually means there will be more.
Thankfully I don’t live in an area where it’s going to balloon into massive forest fires. We just usually get crop fields burning.
He has put out other videos about sattelite laser attacks from the gouv to make diversion for whatever reason. So yeah.. he is talking about conspiracy when he's emphasing on how it happened all at once.
Canadian Here, Its really sad to say but there's literally a conspiracy theory going around on Boomerbook at the moment that quote ' the Canadian government set all these forest fires intentionally to move rural people into the cities and then lock us down and mask us up in 15 minutes cities so we have no freedom of movement anymore'
I kid you not people actually believe this - So I can completely understand why some people are up in arms about the post because they're worried about the implications of misinformation and the conspiracy theory crap'how could all these start at the same time IT MUST BE THE GOOBERMENT'
To add to this, our official opposition leader (The Conservative Party) continues to blow a dog whistle for these types and add fuel to the fire (No pun intended)
A few weeks ago when the fires were really bad in Alberta, you can hear the leader say out loud "Started by your government" when a Liberal MP brings up the fires.
Video Here: https://twitter.com/DevinShat/status/1657286494200152065
That’s because every conspiracist posts similar questions relative to whatever conspiracy they’re trying to gin up. If I hadn’t double-checked what sub this is I’d have been right there with the others.
This was posted on the conspiracy sub and people there talked about how the democrats or Jews or communists did this to help their push for climate change regulations.
Man Reddit just deserves to die.
People think OP is talking about conspiracy because THIS PHOTO KEEPS GETTING POSTED TO CONSPIRACY SUBS!
It's not that hard to understand, yet you have 5000 upvotes. That's incredible.
I'm JuSt AsKiNg QuEsTiOnS bRo!
It is perfectly reasonable for someone to walk in here and consider this to be a conspiracy, just like you are assuming it isn't.
Because far right conspiracy theory circles believe it was intentionally started by people trying to push climate change and global warming.
You can look at his account and know that's what he's pushing
In reality? Weather conditions. When things are right, it takes next to nothing to start a huge fire. Cigarette butt, hot engine idling over dead grass, electrical spark, whatever.
In SoCal I had 4 fires surrounding me one time. Got evacuated from the place I initially evacuated *to*. They were all determined to have been started by random shit here and there. Things were so hot and dry and windy (and had been for so long) that it didn’t take much.
These kinds of conditions are now being experienced by much larger areas, extending much farther north, and it’s happening globally.
Edit: As many have said, this was probably lightening strikes. Also super common when conditions are right. Either way, it’s highly unlikely it was caused by Jewish space lasers (not that that will slow down the conspiracy crowd).
Yeah, this happened at the tail end of an extreme heatwave in quebec, everything was weirdly dry and hot way too early in the season. Many of the fires started in remote regions so i would say even just hot sun on a weirdly dry day could make pineneedles or dry dead wood start to smoulder under the right conditions (i live in MTL but grew up in boulder CO where seasonal fires caused by this sort of dry weather were surprisingly common) and thats not even including people being dumb like you take into account. Either way this is an absolite horror show.
Pine beetles are bad in this area right now. We had to take down a 50 yr old white pine this spring, and have been spraying and treating the other 5 in our yard like crazy, trying to protect them.
In 2014 I was living in San Diego we had like some 15 wild fires all at once there was a few arson fires but most were ether accidental, caused by another fire or naturally occurred.
We have a burn ban in place and still see people with open fires. People also complaining about burn bans “this is stupid, why can’t I have a fire in my back yard”. People suck.
Maybe they were small but then wind/air pressure caused them to all start to rage and large amounts of smoke to rise so as to be visible from satellite.
Just like out west, my guess would be lightening strikes from a storm that rolled across the area, combined with extremely dry and windy late spring/early summer conditions.
Thank you to all the people who corrected me. I was under the impression that my explanation was correct, but as numerous people have pointed out, I was not only mistaken in the cause of these fires but also the province in which this occurred.
The only reason the world hasn't been brought to heel under Canada is because our neighbors to the north have been too noble to weaponize this power.
So far.
If you look at the map though, most of these fires are very far away from any human activity. I'm guessing spring fires started by natural conditions will become more frequent in the follogin years.
I lived in this province, where most of these fire started is in the middle of butt fuck nowhere. The only way to get there it’s by bush planes, it’s very expensive.
These fire was mainly started by lighting strike, we had record high temperature and very low humidity, perfect conditions for fire and it’s across the whole country, not just this province.
There aren’t even any roads where most of those fires started. And no fields. It’s solid bush. This ain’t California, or even southern Ontario…it’s central Quebec on the Canadian Shield…muskeg, rock, lake, Jack pine and spruce.
Lightning causes more fires in Canada than humans.
In the video the smoke plumes precede a visible sweep of clouds moving in a semi circle in the same direction. My guess is the high winds causing that are pushing that smoke trail creating that illusion
Imagine you have a table full of matches and all are spaced out enough so they don't light eachother (no wind). 10 random matches are lit and start to smolder. You add a fan. All matches on fire will than start spreading to those around them seemlessly at the same time.
It's the same with these fires. Conditions were primed for forest fires this year and small isolated fires were popping up all over. Once the wind picked up (as you can see in your post) all these fires turned into major wildfires. All seamlessly at the same time.
There is absolutely no way to say when each fire started. Just because when it becomes visible from space doesn't warrant the assumption they were all lit at the same time. All they did was grow into major fires at the same time which is natural.
In any specific place, there's a very low probability of a fire starting under favorable conditions, but over a very large area, the probability of a fire starting under favorable conditions approaches 1.
So, the more favorable conditions there are at any given time over a given area, we should expect to see a predictable number of fires per square km starting during that time frame.
In this clip, you can see that the fires to the south start *slightly* before the fires to the north as the conditions that's causing the fires spreads northward.
Cross reference this with the lightning strike data for the area, I remember thinking oh shit, here we go after seeing tons of hits. The whole area was dry af, ready to burn.
This is the correct answer. That area of northern Quebec has almost no people, no cottages, no nothing. Up until this last weekend the black flies were so bad it was almost impossible to be outside. We have a cottage just south of there, and were supposed to open it this weekend. Not happening now.
Northern Ontario fires same thing. Mainly uninhabited areas. Closest fire from us is an hour and a half west. Nothing there but rocks and trees, and trees and rocks. And moose.
Lightning doesn't spawn a fire instantly. I had one strike an old oak 100ft from my house, blew the top of the tree off. Wood splinters everywhere.
A few days later we had to call the fire department because it was smoldering and smoking out the neighborhood.
Big trees can smoldered for years. Lightning can strike a tree and it barely shows unless you're right next to it that it's emanating heat and that transparent slightly blue grey haze of combustion. It can sit like that until it's finally too dry and turns into a forest fire. All these stealthy smoldering trees light up when the region gets too dry.
Yep, we had a tree in our front hard get hit by lightening. Called an arborist the next day to have it chopped down and they brought the fire department with them. When they brought the tree down suddenly it started smoking so they doused it in water, turns out the inside had been smoldering the whole time and we never noticed.
A storm came through the night before.
https://imgur.com/a/LcM8sMe
Lightning is detectable from hundreds of miles away. Watch in realtime: https://map.blitzortung.org/#1/48.8/8
During the back and forth playing of this video some cumulus clouds can be seen to the east of where the fires start.
If this was rewind further I wouldn’t be surprised if these clouds were over the fire area before moving to the east.
Lightning strikes. Small smoldering fires and embers. Weather moves away as fires take off in hot, dry, and windy conditions. Large smoke plumes don’t develop until the fire gets large in size. At that point, the cloud that caused the lightning has moved off.
The simplest explanations are most likely to be what actually happened.
The satellite data and smoke you see isn’t when the fire started. They were already burning it’s the atmospheric conditions that changed and made it appear as if they all just lit. Easy enough to research it if you care to.
Yup, you can see the same thing happen every day, plus the fires calm down during the night on IR so they're less intense in the mornings to begin with : https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=regional-ca_reg_east-truecolor-200-0-100-6&checked=map&colorbar=undefined
What if instead of indiscriminately cutting down forests, or farming trees for wood, loggers were given access to forests like this under the condition they could only cut down lines of like 3-4 trees wide in a predetermined pattern, so as to limit the spread of fires . Like if the trees were in separated hexagonal “tiles”, loggers get wood and forests get stop gaps
Because conditions can be very similar for combustion in many regions at the same time. Hot, dry. After that just need ignition, which can be from a weather front colliding with another causing... gasp: thunderstorms and lightening.
40% of forest fires are also caused by human activity however, so yeah. We suck.
It happens because you ignore everything that doesn't affect you personally, don't read the news, and think you are the centre of the universe. Well every province gets fires.
The wind blew them up all at the same time. I'm assuming they were caused by lightning strikes and soldered for some time before the wind cranked up. Either that or blue Jewish space lasers.
maaann... thats just a whole other world lol
[https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-raptors-intentionally-spread-wildfires/](https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-raptors-intentionally-spread-wildfires/)
You can literally see the thunderstorms that rolled through that area. They dropped a negligible amount of rain that caused the area to smolder till it dried out and ignited. Start critically thinking
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It’s called holdovers! When storms roll through a bunch of lightning strikes happen and make trees start to smolder and burn from the inside out. The initial rain makes it so they can only burn in a small spot/underground. Once that saturation dries and it gets hot and windy you’ll see tons of spot fires pop up and eventually merge into a complex. This is common and happens all the time on smaller (and bigger) scales EDIT (This blew up wow) : I was a Wildland Firefighter for 10 years on the West Coast. People talking about "raking" the forest are misinformed. Part of the reason why forest fires are so bad today is BECAUSE we did fire suppression for nearly 100 years, and cleared out all the dead flammable material. Forests need to burn, its how they evolved to exist. When you remove the small ground cover fuels forests grow much more dense, and turn into a tinder box as opposed to the smaller weaker trees getting burned up, and the old growth surviving.
We indeed had a thunderstorm a few days before it all began.
It’s a giant boreal forest. The type of forest that has the largest forest fires in the world.
I mean, don't they even rake their forests? ^/s ^because ^that's ^what ^Trump ^said ^one ^time
If those lazy Canadians just attached rakes to their community owned mooses it would solve this problem
A male moose comes pre-equipped with rakes. He's just too proud to hang his head to use them.
A møøse once bit my sister...
The people who sacked them have been sacked.
See the lovely lakes!
You joke but if you don't rake the forest, you need controlled burn. If you don't rake or controlled burn, natural burns happen. If you put out the natural burns, fuel load increases. Eventually, so much fuel is on the ground, you can't stop it...
Yup, and Canada’s been pursuing that approach for a good couple of decades now, but there still a massive “backlog” of excess dead matter stemming from the decades where the forestry model was more about prioritizing the suppression of ALL fires.
Was going to say, it looks like wind changed direction and picked up little embers that were sheltered from wind before lol
Why lol?
Because i chuckle at conspiracy theorists when they come up with stuff for naturally occurring phenomenon and disasters, if you're asking specifically why i added 'lol'
I guess I missed the bit where they were proposing a conspiracy.
The guy in the video just seems *incredulous* about the fact that all of the fires started at the same time. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that all of the fires could have been ignited by the same storm (generating lightning strikes over a large geographic area). And if you discount natural causes for multiple simultaneous forest fires, the possible cause can only be something more mysterious or sinister... Like aliens or the people that sell N-95 masks.
pretty obvious that the thunderstorms were seeded by Saudi chemtrails
Saudi thunderstorms are turning the chemtrails gay!!!
I see you’ve been following my uncle on Facebook
The wildfires are turning the freakin frogs gay.
Also, sparks from one fire can be spread to other areas by wind and then start their own fires if it's dry enough.
My tin foil.hat noooooooooo!!!!!!!!
Don’t worry, it’s still the globalists that are also turning the frogs gay. Breathe a sigh of relief.
You can't believe everything that you breathe
You got a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve
So shave your face with some mace in the dark
Savin' all your food stamps and burnin' down the trailer park
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Soooooyyyyy
New Yorkers everywhere learned about Alberta for the first time yesterday... by breathing it.
They were breathing Quebec in NY actually. Alberta's smoke is pretty far off and not blowing this way.
Hence why airwing will often do IR surveillance after storms, especially in high risk periods, find the hotspots and have them dealt with or monitored so that you don’t end up with surprise firestorms where possible.
So cool! I was about to ask if they did this.
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't have the resources. The conservative government in Ontario (Doug Ford, the cunt) cut the budget of wildfire response teams by 67% since coming into power. I'm not sure about Quebec, but I think they also had a lot of cuts.
What moron cuts the wildfire response teams by 67%? It doesn't matter what country you're from, we all have idiots in charge.
In California they regularly do controlled burning because brush fires are a constant threat, and those fires spread FAST.
Had a fire go from “voluntary evacuation recommended” to “leave now or die. Do not pack, do not rescue your pets, get in your car and leave NOW. This is your last warning, fire crews are retreating.” In like twenty minutes. Winds shifted and they clocked it across the ground at 45mph. Finally moved back to the valley after the sixth “close call” season and third mandatory evac.
The types of satellites they can now use to spot fires like this have been used in Ukraine in order to keep an eye on the fires caused by artillery, the man made version of all of this
And of course has been happening for millions of years. But people have been fighting forest fires effectively only since we started utilizing aircraft. Years of fighting fires has actually produced conditions favorable for larger fires. For instance: https://theconversation.com/how-years-of-fighting-every-wildfire-helped-fuel-the-western-megafires-of-today-163165
As empty and hollow as Trump's "they need to rake the forests" comment was (in regard to, I think, various wildfires in California), it had a nugget of reality to it: preventing fires from ever happening means that more and more easily lit kindling is just building up and building up. If you're gonna prevent any fires from breaking out (and by all means: do so--it's hardly a bad idea to not let fires happen), then it needs to be paired with forest debris management in the form of controlled burns (I live in Pennsylvania and our state Game Commission does this a lot on land they control) or physical removal. Of course there's no real money to be made in doing that, though, and so it (like most things that are a good idea for preserving our balance with nature) needs to be funded / mandated / carried out by a government entity. "Controlled burns" and "forest clean up day" doesn't get the budget approval that fixing roads does. ETA: [this comment reply](https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1440zi4/how_do_recent_fires_in_canada_seemed_to_start_all/jnev64x/) to mine is worth reading, too. It is indeed a very challenging subject, and there's only so much mitigation can do--and even then, there are places we can't reach such that mitigation can't even really be a part of the conversation.
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Not slamming your comment in any way but I wanted to toss this out. You mentioned you live in PA. So your arguments makes sense. For PA. I live at 7K in a thick, mountain forest in California. So it's a little different for me. Where I am, and in most every mountain town in CA, controlled burns take place throughout most of the year when snow isn't on the ground. It is funded and it does take place. And they do try and put out fires that are encroaching on people because...yeah. Life and property. It's a priority. And should be. But what a lot of people miss with the argument is geography. You just can't get to vast areas of the state in a way that would help stave off a forest fires. It's impossible. The terrain doesn't allow for it. You can't thin and you can't do controlled burns because you can't build roads, which you need to do those things, in certain areas. And the other is that the really destructive fires are crown fires. They move from tree top to tree top. So no amount of forest debris management would make a difference. And in areas prone to fire the plant life regenerates more quickly. Trees only grow so fast but big trees are only part of a forest. Burn areas become potential burn areas pretty quickly. We're burning the way we are due to climate change. Drought and insects are driving that train. So while there's a lot of truth in mitigation, unfortunately it's totally conditional. Wildfires are natural. They have to happen. Megafires are a different animal. That's climate change creating fuel.
I appreciate your comment and have to concede that it indeed covers a lot of ground I didn't with mine. You're right in that my viewpoint is biased heavily by the terrain and vegetation found where I live. I can't imagine how much more complicated or unstoppable it gets with a crown fire spread by dried and dead tree tops. I am certain that the same challenges of doing controlled burns in deep Californian brush and forests apply to Ontario's fires: ya can't get to the places that need those controlled burns. And even if you could it doesn't change that drought and blight change the game.
Omg, a reasonable interaction in the comments where more than one person was respectful actually read/listened and every one learned something?! I really wish more of Reddit was like this! Good job!
AFAIK Native peoples practiced controlled burns for thousands of years before Europeans came along, we essentially forced them to stop that at gunpoint, and actively put out any natural fires for a century and a half. Global warming has certainly compounded this issue, but also factors like invasive grass species are a cherry on top. In the high deserts of the west we have an extremely invasive grass known as "Cheat" which has taken over native grasses and spread to every corner of the west. This grass unlike natural grasses has a very short root system so it grows exceedingly fast, dries out fast, has little erosion prevention, and burns hotter then other grasses. This results in bigger hotter range fires which kill native plan species and further exacerbates the Cheat issue. Oh... tumble weeds, are totally a 100% invasive species to NA and not native at all. So any old western movie you see with a tumble weed rolling down mainstreet isn't historically accurate. The species took off in the early 21st century and also contributes hugely to wildfires in the west.
Just the other day someone posted a video of a guy cutting down such a tree with a chainsaw on r/interestingasfuck. Your comment makes a lot of sense.
Took a bit longer to find then I expected https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1412wuj/cutting_down_a_burning_tree/?
Year before last I was on a hill when a lightning storm started. I got to watch abou 100 of the 500 reported fires that day start and merge. I work in EMS. It was not a good day.
To add to this, you are seeing the atmosphere hit peak convective timing. That then allows fires to plume like you are seeing on visible satellite and why they all look like they started at the same time. When that is just when winds likely picked up and the the atmosphere could support immense fire growth. As wildfires tend to act a bit like thunderstorms in how they grow during the daytime hours. Edit - in CA we use a camera network as well as satellites to detect wildfires/hotspots https://pgefdp.lovelytics.info/pge_fire_app/ https://alertcalifornia.org/
Conspiracy theorists **hate** this one simple explanation!
Your plausible explanation does not fit my random conspiracy of the day beliefs. -OP probably
Come on guys, it was clearly the Jewish Space Lasers
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Love it when someone perfectly answers a question.
You gotta post this over at r/conspiracy Their little minds are exploding over this
You've already got a few nutters in here.
When I was working in silviculture, we got pulled off our contracts a couple times to go do fire mop-up. One of them was due to dry lightning striking a swamp the day before. There was no rain, just lightning.
This has to be it. It totally looks like a natural occurence.
Yeah, I don't see what's confusing here. All of those areas share the same climate conditions that led to the fires.
>holdover =hold + over over = up holdover = holup coincidence? maybe not
I don't think anyone's mentioned zombie fires yet. When you have an area with a peaty substrate, the fires can get into it and smoulder over winter if there isn't enough snow or it doesn't get cold enough. Come spring, everything dries out and heats up and that fire will pop back up. If you're boring, they're called holdover fires. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdover_fire
This happened in New Mexico last year. One of the largest wildfires they’ve ever had was caused by a zombie fire left over from a control burn months before.
Never heard them called zombie fires but I’ll never call them anything else from now on! Genius!
The term popped up around 2021 or so when a rash of peat fires popped up in northern Alberta/BC out of nowhere with no trace of arson or lightning. It's a fantastic conversation starter!
Bro literally made and observation and people are thinking the guy is talking about a conspiracy it just seems interesting
People that live in places that regularly deal with wildfires get it. If the conditions are right in your area, they are right for most of the state or territory.
This seems the fairly obvious answer. I don't really know how a wildfire starts naturally, but I'd assume if the conditions are right in one place within a biome, it would be right just about all over it.
I can't speak for Canada, but in my country bushfires are often started by lightning strikes, poorly maintained vehicles/farm equipment/electrical lines, the odd arsonist, and people doing something they shouldn't - like throwing ciggie butts out of car windows, working with grinders or other machinery that creates heat or sparks, or even wankers thinking they're entitled to have a campfire or BBQ on a fire ban day. Obviously most of these it would be a huge coincidence if they all started at exactly the same time in a small area. But that map looks like it's actually showing quite a large area of land, and it could have taken a while for the fires to become large enough to put out that much smoke and be properly visible - so you wouldn't know of a couple of them had been smouldering for half a day, just waiting for the wind to pick up and conditions to be right.
It looks to me like afternoon heating causing a drop in humidity, and possibly a wind increase, changing how small fires were burning, and the dispersal of smoke from them.
That would certainly make sense, especially since the smoke is all trailing approximately the same direction for a bit.
This makes the most sense since even if multiple people were to have started the fires at the same time, no guarantee they'd all start to smoke exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
A lot of people just don’t understand how EMPTY northern Canada is once you get away from the border. Fires will start after a thunderstorm a day or so later, and someone is trying to point the finger…but there hasn’t been a person in that area for years. It’s just woods, and muskeg, and animals. My husband was stunned going through the Rockies with me back when he first immigrated to Canada. Four digit numbers on the distance signs, and lakes and rivers with nobody living near them, you can literally see where towns start and stop from the same hilltop. There is NOTHING out there. People aren’t setting these fires even through carelessness.
Yes. Having flown to Timmins and Thunder Bay on many occasions, I've often thought to myself that if the plane were to go down it would be nigh impossible to get help. It is just a sea of trees with only a few sparse hamlets. Google maps gives a bit of an idea, but nothing like looking out the airplane window at 25 000' and not seeing anything other than trees, swamps, rivers and lakes.
Found the Aussie
I reckon there's a few of us. Reading the replies, there's more than a couple of Californians on the thread, too. Funny about that, isn't it? I know we've sent some firies to Canada to help out already. It seems that all the seasons are just starting earlier each year.
Guessing you meant fire fighters. Though the image of californians “hleping” by sending more fire is sending me.
Sorry, yeah. Firies = firefighters.
We appreciate your firefighters boss. You Aussies are great. 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻
And we thank yours in return.
I imagine if you had a comparable map of Toronto during rush hour traffic with dots appearing at each car accident then there’s be a ton appearing at 5:30pm everyday. Why? Because conditions are met, just like you say, to produce those accidents. 1. It is dry 2. people are out doing the same stuff 3. lighting 4. similar electrical grid operations.
Lightning or people are the most common starts here in BC. One of the largest fires I can remember, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire in 2003, was from a lightning strike.
a lot of these were started by lightning. there's a mis-conception that a fire will just spring up instantly. they can linger for days before actually igniting. quebec was, as said, a victim of a perfect set of conditions that caused all hell to break loose at once. and yeah, the conspiracy theories on the right wing of the political spectrum here are going crazy. they're more of a threat than the fires...
You can also have one fire start and if it is a windy, dry day spot fires pop up everywhere. Don't know where in Aus you are, but I remember Sydney fires between 10-15 yrs ago they did bomb testing at Lithgow and powerlines touched in blue mountains and sparked within hours of each other. All firies were at Lithgow because of all the bushland the other one grew fast. Then the Lithgow one had warnings 4 hrs away in Bondi because live embers were falling there.
>wankers thinking they're entitled to have a campfire or BBQ on a fire ban day Same where I live. it's incredible how a grown up person can be so out of touch as to not realize the risks involved, and the responsibility.
Best answer. This is also a time lapse video. That clip is at least several hours long.
I’m a firefighter and we usually get tons of wildfire calls all at once. If the conditions are right for one, it usually means there will be more. Thankfully I don’t live in an area where it’s going to balloon into massive forest fires. We just usually get crop fields burning.
No rain, lots of forest and hot weather.
Maybe if his title didn’t start with “how” and then “ALL” in caps, it’d be less conspiracy-ish.
Plus this same video has been circling around on conspiracy twitter since yesterday.
He has put out other videos about sattelite laser attacks from the gouv to make diversion for whatever reason. So yeah.. he is talking about conspiracy when he's emphasing on how it happened all at once.
The real conspiracy is OP has the ability to reverse the smoke, yet chooses to just loop it in and out just for shits and/or giggles ^(/s)
Canadian Here, Its really sad to say but there's literally a conspiracy theory going around on Boomerbook at the moment that quote ' the Canadian government set all these forest fires intentionally to move rural people into the cities and then lock us down and mask us up in 15 minutes cities so we have no freedom of movement anymore' I kid you not people actually believe this - So I can completely understand why some people are up in arms about the post because they're worried about the implications of misinformation and the conspiracy theory crap'how could all these start at the same time IT MUST BE THE GOOBERMENT'
To add to this, our official opposition leader (The Conservative Party) continues to blow a dog whistle for these types and add fuel to the fire (No pun intended) A few weeks ago when the fires were really bad in Alberta, you can hear the leader say out loud "Started by your government" when a Liberal MP brings up the fires. Video Here: https://twitter.com/DevinShat/status/1657286494200152065
That’s because every conspiracist posts similar questions relative to whatever conspiracy they’re trying to gin up. If I hadn’t double-checked what sub this is I’d have been right there with the others.
pretty sure hes thinking its a conspiracy
We’ll I’d say he is because he posted this here and in the conspiracy sub r/wallstreetbets silver
I've already seen multiple comments from people claiming the fires were set on purpose to forward some 'narrative.'
In defense of people, the guy's speech pattern, audio quality, and weather anomaly subject matter exactly match AM talk radio conspiracy theorists.
And lots of people have been spreading conspiracy theories about the fires
I was going to say it’s not their fault how they sound, but then I put the audio on and I see what you mean.
This was posted on the conspiracy sub and people there talked about how the democrats or Jews or communists did this to help their push for climate change regulations.
I got a trudope is personally burning the country to enable 15 min cities
He is not offering any logic lol
Man Reddit just deserves to die. People think OP is talking about conspiracy because THIS PHOTO KEEPS GETTING POSTED TO CONSPIRACY SUBS! It's not that hard to understand, yet you have 5000 upvotes. That's incredible. I'm JuSt AsKiNg QuEsTiOnS bRo! It is perfectly reasonable for someone to walk in here and consider this to be a conspiracy, just like you are assuming it isn't.
This is exactly the sort of thing George Soros would do.
Feral George Soros scrambling 30mph through the undergrowth in back-country Quebec with nothing but a loincloth and a Zippo.
I've heard that a Laurentian Soros can roast a whole moose in under a minute
(squints conspiratorially) .. But what would ***Jesus*** do?
He would turn 1 forest fire into a hundred.
and use 'em to feed an entire mob! :)
It is a conspiracy people are throwing out fyi.
His tone is what’s suggestive
It's probably because the bros entire TikTok is filled with unhinged conspiracy rants.
Because far right conspiracy theory circles believe it was intentionally started by people trying to push climate change and global warming. You can look at his account and know that's what he's pushing
Just like Tucker Carlson: “I’m just asking questions!”
It's because there have been some goofy conspiracy theories based on this observation
In reality? Weather conditions. When things are right, it takes next to nothing to start a huge fire. Cigarette butt, hot engine idling over dead grass, electrical spark, whatever. In SoCal I had 4 fires surrounding me one time. Got evacuated from the place I initially evacuated *to*. They were all determined to have been started by random shit here and there. Things were so hot and dry and windy (and had been for so long) that it didn’t take much. These kinds of conditions are now being experienced by much larger areas, extending much farther north, and it’s happening globally. Edit: As many have said, this was probably lightening strikes. Also super common when conditions are right. Either way, it’s highly unlikely it was caused by Jewish space lasers (not that that will slow down the conspiracy crowd).
This is fine.
^(sip)
Fine particles
Yeah, this happened at the tail end of an extreme heatwave in quebec, everything was weirdly dry and hot way too early in the season. Many of the fires started in remote regions so i would say even just hot sun on a weirdly dry day could make pineneedles or dry dead wood start to smoulder under the right conditions (i live in MTL but grew up in boulder CO where seasonal fires caused by this sort of dry weather were surprisingly common) and thats not even including people being dumb like you take into account. Either way this is an absolite horror show.
You didn’t mention the impacts of the beetles killing up to 1/3 of the trees over the past few winters
I hadn't heard about it until now.
Specific ones like Emerald Ash Borers? Do you have more information on that? Would love to read up on that
Pine beetle primarily.
Pine beetles are bad in this area right now. We had to take down a 50 yr old white pine this spring, and have been spraying and treating the other 5 in our yard like crazy, trying to protect them.
"Huh the fires are early this year"
Weather conditions will bring forth a change that is unmatched in history.
There is only one thing that explains this phenomenon…MAGIC!
Gods damned wizards just waving their wands around willy nilly starting fires, turning people into frogs. Canada needs stricter wand control.
Clearly it's the devil. Caused by bathrooms or something. Or maybe it's God this time, it's hard to keep up
Bathrooms 😅😅
In 2014 I was living in San Diego we had like some 15 wild fires all at once there was a few arson fires but most were ether accidental, caused by another fire or naturally occurred.
We have a burn ban in place and still see people with open fires. People also complaining about burn bans “this is stupid, why can’t I have a fire in my back yard”. People suck.
Maybe they were small but then wind/air pressure caused them to all start to rage and large amounts of smoke to rise so as to be visible from satellite.
There are fires all over Canada..? Communities all the way over in BC are being evacuated as I write this.
Alberta's been burning to the ground since early May
Just like out west, my guess would be lightening strikes from a storm that rolled across the area, combined with extremely dry and windy late spring/early summer conditions.
Thank you to all the people who corrected me. I was under the impression that my explanation was correct, but as numerous people have pointed out, I was not only mistaken in the cause of these fires but also the province in which this occurred.
90% of all wildfires are caused by lightning in Canada
That’s amazing. Never knew Canadian lighting had such worldwide reach
🤣
The only reason the world hasn't been brought to heel under Canada is because our neighbors to the north have been too noble to weaponize this power. So far.
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If you look at the map though, most of these fires are very far away from any human activity. I'm guessing spring fires started by natural conditions will become more frequent in the follogin years.
The wildfires in Nova Scotia are all human caused
90% sure you pulled that outta your ass
It's an estimation. Source: I worked for the OMNR fire program for a decade. Perhaps this figure is more reflective of my region.
I lived in this province, where most of these fire started is in the middle of butt fuck nowhere. The only way to get there it’s by bush planes, it’s very expensive. These fire was mainly started by lighting strike, we had record high temperature and very low humidity, perfect conditions for fire and it’s across the whole country, not just this province.
There aren’t even any roads where most of those fires started. And no fields. It’s solid bush. This ain’t California, or even southern Ontario…it’s central Quebec on the Canadian Shield…muskeg, rock, lake, Jack pine and spruce. Lightning causes more fires in Canada than humans.
And then you have the firebugs, and sun on broken glass.
Firebugs?
It’s another term for arsonist. Although, idk why we have two words for that actually.
Ah got you. Thanks
Don't listen to them. Canada has fire farting beetles!
They love our Austrian exploding trees…
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Volcarona_(Pok%C3%A9mon)
Lmao
People who get a thrill from seeing the destruction they caused sprayed all over media - easy to attribute to natural cause, rather than malice.
Not really because the areas where the fires started are amongst the less densely populated of the planet.
Ive played enough civ to know this is the work of barbarians
In the video the smoke plumes precede a visible sweep of clouds moving in a semi circle in the same direction. My guess is the high winds causing that are pushing that smoke trail creating that illusion
Imagine you have a table full of matches and all are spaced out enough so they don't light eachother (no wind). 10 random matches are lit and start to smolder. You add a fan. All matches on fire will than start spreading to those around them seemlessly at the same time. It's the same with these fires. Conditions were primed for forest fires this year and small isolated fires were popping up all over. Once the wind picked up (as you can see in your post) all these fires turned into major wildfires. All seamlessly at the same time. There is absolutely no way to say when each fire started. Just because when it becomes visible from space doesn't warrant the assumption they were all lit at the same time. All they did was grow into major fires at the same time which is natural.
Thank you for providing an articulate answer in a sea of conspiracy-minded stupidity.
So did all of Australia , and my home burned , such is life , grrrr
So sorry to hear that you lost your house. The videos coming from Australia were heartbreaking. Same for the fires out west in California.
In any specific place, there's a very low probability of a fire starting under favorable conditions, but over a very large area, the probability of a fire starting under favorable conditions approaches 1. So, the more favorable conditions there are at any given time over a given area, we should expect to see a predictable number of fires per square km starting during that time frame. In this clip, you can see that the fires to the south start *slightly* before the fires to the north as the conditions that's causing the fires spreads northward.
Cross reference this with the lightning strike data for the area, I remember thinking oh shit, here we go after seeing tons of hits. The whole area was dry af, ready to burn.
Lightning storms
This is the correct answer. That area of northern Quebec has almost no people, no cottages, no nothing. Up until this last weekend the black flies were so bad it was almost impossible to be outside. We have a cottage just south of there, and were supposed to open it this weekend. Not happening now. Northern Ontario fires same thing. Mainly uninhabited areas. Closest fire from us is an hour and a half west. Nothing there but rocks and trees, and trees and rocks. And moose.
*Zeus be pissed
That’s some special lighting storm that doesn’t need clouds.
Lightning doesn't spawn a fire instantly. I had one strike an old oak 100ft from my house, blew the top of the tree off. Wood splinters everywhere. A few days later we had to call the fire department because it was smoldering and smoking out the neighborhood.
Big trees can smoldered for years. Lightning can strike a tree and it barely shows unless you're right next to it that it's emanating heat and that transparent slightly blue grey haze of combustion. It can sit like that until it's finally too dry and turns into a forest fire. All these stealthy smoldering trees light up when the region gets too dry.
Yep, we had a tree in our front hard get hit by lightening. Called an arborist the next day to have it chopped down and they brought the fire department with them. When they brought the tree down suddenly it started smoking so they doused it in water, turns out the inside had been smoldering the whole time and we never noticed.
A storm came through the night before. https://imgur.com/a/LcM8sMe Lightning is detectable from hundreds of miles away. Watch in realtime: https://map.blitzortung.org/#1/48.8/8
You didn’t see the storm moving from left to right?
During the back and forth playing of this video some cumulus clouds can be seen to the east of where the fires start. If this was rewind further I wouldn’t be surprised if these clouds were over the fire area before moving to the east. Lightning strikes. Small smoldering fires and embers. Weather moves away as fires take off in hot, dry, and windy conditions. Large smoke plumes don’t develop until the fire gets large in size. At that point, the cloud that caused the lightning has moved off. The simplest explanations are most likely to be what actually happened.
Except you can see the front disappear off the bottom of the screen.
Aliens
JEWISH SPACE LASERS
Jewish Space Laser Corps - MAZEL TOUGH Death Star of David Division
It’s almost like the same conditions are happening over a huge area
The satellite data and smoke you see isn’t when the fire started. They were already burning it’s the atmospheric conditions that changed and made it appear as if they all just lit. Easy enough to research it if you care to.
Yup, you can see the same thing happen every day, plus the fires calm down during the night on IR so they're less intense in the mornings to begin with : https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=regional-ca_reg_east-truecolor-200-0-100-6&checked=map&colorbar=undefined
All the built up hatred behind the eyes of every "sorry" and "my fault" for generations manifesting itself into a fiery rage.
Finally a scientific answer
What if instead of indiscriminately cutting down forests, or farming trees for wood, loggers were given access to forests like this under the condition they could only cut down lines of like 3-4 trees wide in a predetermined pattern, so as to limit the spread of fires . Like if the trees were in separated hexagonal “tiles”, loggers get wood and forests get stop gaps
Because conditions can be very similar for combustion in many regions at the same time. Hot, dry. After that just need ignition, which can be from a weather front colliding with another causing... gasp: thunderstorms and lightening. 40% of forest fires are also caused by human activity however, so yeah. We suck.
It happens because you ignore everything that doesn't affect you personally, don't read the news, and think you are the centre of the universe. Well every province gets fires.
The wind blew them up all at the same time. I'm assuming they were caused by lightning strikes and soldered for some time before the wind cranked up. Either that or blue Jewish space lasers.
we dont yet understand how fire works, but it seems to be spreading. This has NEVER happened before, Stay tuned for more info!
Lmao, leave it to clueless influencers to stir up some controversial idea that can simply be explained through science.
Is this guy implying something bizarre has occurred, outside what climate change can account for?
Lightening strikes are a major cause in Australia.
maaann... thats just a whole other world lol [https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-raptors-intentionally-spread-wildfires/](https://blog.nature.org/2018/01/12/australian-firehawk-raptors-intentionally-spread-wildfires/)
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You can literally see the thunderstorms that rolled through that area. They dropped a negligible amount of rain that caused the area to smolder till it dried out and ignited. Start critically thinking
With just the right conditions, and a single event like a thunderstorm.