Heavy rains in the Black Rock Desert, where Burning Man is being held, have forced organizers to ban 73,000 attendees from leaving because “widespread muddy conditions created treacherous driving conditions,” according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.
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Little economic support is available to evacuees now out of work, insurance disputes loom and economic growth may be eroded.
While this year’s wildfire rampage is far from over, its growing economic costs are becoming increasingly clear.
Although we’ve already seen about 10 times as much land burn in Canada this year than we did in all of 2022, this season is unlikely to be a record breaker in terms of financial devastation.
That dubious title belongs to the 2016 season, when the Fort McMurray fire alone forced the evacuation of about 90,000 people and ultimately cost the insurance industry about 4.4 billion Canadian dollars.
That fire also significantly affected the Canadian economy by disrupting production at the oil sands.
But there’s no question that this year’s fires have taken a significant toll on thousands of people as well as governments and, it is likely, the Canadian economy as a whole.
42% of wildfire evacuations occur in Indigenous communities, researcher
While wildfire season and evacuation alerts have become par for the course for many communities across Canada, for Indigenous people its far too frequent.
“It’s a really disproportionate impact when Indigenous people only make up 5 per cent of the population in Canada but 42 per cent of wildfire evacuation events occur in their communities,” said Amy Cardinal Christianson, a Métis fire research scientist. “A lot of that is because of where Indigenous communities are located.”
As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked, and the proposed policy responses are enormously ineffective.
LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — Maui County released the names of 388 people still missing Thursday more than two weeks after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, and officials asked anyone who knows a person on the list to be safe to contact authorities.
The FBI compiled the list of names. The number of confirmed dead after fires on Maui that destroyed the historic seaside community of Lahaina stands at 115, a number the county said is expected to rise.
Link fixed!
Maui officials promised to improve fire safety following the near-deadly blaze, but didn’t broadly act, according to an investigation by The Post
KAUA’ULA VALLEY, Hawaii — Burning homes have a specific kind of plastic smell, one Samantha and David Dizon know too well. So when it wafted through their windows on Aug. 8, they froze. Running outside, they saw the plumes of smoke coming from Lahaina and heard propane tanks exploding in the distance. They knew what was unfolding, because nearly five years ago, the same thing had happened to them.
Around 11 p.m. on Aug. 24, 2018, something ignited in the dry, grassy hills behind their home in the Kaua’ula Valley, a West Maui community uphill from Lahaina. Howling winds from a passing hurricane helped feed that spark, sending what the Dizons called a “wall of fire” toward their unincorporated village, where about 50 Native Hawaiian people live on ancestral (known as Kuleana) land that has been in their families for centuries.
Instead of preparing for wildfires, Hawaii was busy going “green.”
Politicians, the media and environmentalists spent the past week blaming the Maui fires on global warming.
“That level of destruction, and a fire hurricane, something new to us in this age of global warming, was the ultimate reason that so many people perished,” Hawaii Gov. Joshua Green claimed, while ignoring his state’s mismanagement of the disaster and its botched response at every level from the power grid that wasn’t secured to the sirens that didn’t go off.
As Yellowknife evacuates in the face of an oncoming naturally caused wildfire, police in the city say they discovered an attempted arson overnight.
RCMP said a fire on Deh Cho Boulevard, a bypass road on the western periphery of Yellowknife nearest the oncoming fire, was reported at 4am on Friday.
A red sun over Montreal. Crops withering in the field. Thousands of people fleeing a territorial capital. Smoke blanketing cities from Toronto to Ottawa to New York.
These are not scenes out of a dystopian novel but pulled straight from Canada’s summer of fire and smoke, now cresting in the frightening evacuations of Yellowknife and Kelowna.
😭😱 this is so awful. I had great memories of the Shuswap Lake cottage community (not really, but that's beside the point). This is nuts 😡😒#BCWildfire#ClimateCrisispic.twitter.com/AfL9udUYfu
— Karen Woods 林爷 🇺🇦🇨🇦🌻 (@KarenWenLin) August 19, 2023
Please pray for Kelowna BC Canada. The latest forest fires are insane. If you’re in the Okanagan and you need respite for ur family or ur Animals/ livestock reach out. I have fenced 40 acres in Shuswap and access to 30 acres outside Vernon. Open to anyone that needs it. Dm me. pic.twitter.com/HYQv6qZrLk
— Bam VanCity (@VanCity_Bam) August 19, 2023
Two arson incidents in Yellowknife, four people charged, two sought
h/t Mauser
41.73º N, 49.95º W, North Atlantic Ocean, June 18, 2023
Fate cleared up the weather, blew off the fog, and calmed the waves, as the submersible and its five passengers dived through the surface waters and fell into another world. They entered the deep ocean’s uppermost layer, known as the twilight zone, passing creatures glimmering with bioluminescence, tiny fish with enormous teeth. Then they entered the midnight zone, where larger creatures ghost by like alien moons. Two miles down, they entered the abyssal zone—so named because it’s the literal abyss.
Deeper means heavier: pressures of 5,000, then 6,000 pounds per square inch. As it descended, the submersible was gripped in a tightening vise. Maybe they heard a noise then, maybe they heard an alarm.
I hope they watched the abyss with awe through their viewport, because I’d like to think their last sights were magnificent ones.
Meta began blocking news from appearing across its platforms in Canada this month after prolonged negotiations with the government over Canada’s new Online News Act.
As Canada grapples with its worst ever wildfire season, thousands of Canadians are could now be affected by a shortage of news content across Meta’s platforms.
Update – Canada demands Meta lift news ban to allow wildfire info sharing
Hawaii had the world’s fanciest natural disaster warning system on the planet. It also had an ongoing firebug problem, and recent academic study warning that the place was very vulnerable to fire catastrophes.
Somehow, none of that figured in the government’s fire plan. The firebug is still out there. The conditions created for big fires, such as the proliferation of non-native grasses, remain on Maui. And the fancy emergency warning system somehow didn’t work.
Horrifying new footage has emerged of dozens of Hawaiians flailing in the choppy water after jumping in to avoid the catastrophic wildfire that torched the town of Lahaina earlier this week.
The fire began on Tuesday, spreading quickly and ferociously. The exact cause of it remains unclear but high winds, dry conditions and low humidity exacerbated the flames.
Fifty-five people have been confirmed dead already and 1,000 remain missing three days on from the blaze.
🚨 #BREAKING | #Hawaii | #Maui | #Lahaina | #lahainafire | #MauiFires |
New video has emerged of people jumping into the ocean from wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii pic.twitter.com/c3hrR99IYR
— Bot News (@BotNews18) August 11, 2023
WAILUKU, Hawaii (AP) — Thousands of Hawaii residents raced to escape homes on Maui as blazes swept across the island, destroying parts of a centuries-old town and killing at least 36 people in one of the deadliest U.S. wildfires in recent years.
The fire took the island by surprise, leaving behind burned-out cars on once busy streets and smoking piles of rubble where historic buildings had stood in Lahaina Town, which dates to the 1700s and has long been a favorite destination for tourists. Crews battled blazes in several places on the island Wednesday, and the flames forced some adults and children to flee into the ocean.
State of Emergency declared in #Hawaii, #wildfires trigger #mass #evacuations across the islands. #MAUI #HAWAI #WILDFIRE #LAHANIA #lahainafire #MauiFires #MauiWildfires #mauifire pic.twitter.com/71NYEY8ZiY
— Ekta Chaubey (@EktaChaubey10) August 10, 2023
Recent forest fires in Canada and around the world have sparked fear and outrage from those who have been impacted by them. Overeager ecological activists have been quick to take advantage of this and are misleading Canadians about the probability of future fires. Large forest fires make everyone nervous, and deservedly so, but attributing every fire to climate change is both scientifically unsound and horribly opportunistic.
