The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Comparing The Wildfires in Jasper & Los Angeles - Encore

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

An encore of Journalist Matthew Scace on his book, "Jasper on Fire: Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise".

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You're just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge. It's Wednesday, that means our encore edition of the week. And we're only going back one week. A week ago, to hear what Matthew Skace had to say. Now, you haven't heard of Matt Skace before? Well, if you were listening last week, you obviously did. But he's a young reporter in Alberta. He works for the Canadian press.

He used to work for the Calgary Herald. He's been back and forth. He's written articles for newspapers all across Canada. He's just finished his first book, Jasper on Fire, Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise. This is a fascinating book about the fires last year in Jasper. It's especially so when you consider we're watching fires in California. There's a lot of similarities in some of the issues surrounding both fires. And so that's why it's good to hear from Matthew.

So sit back, relax. Here he is, Matt's case. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. Welcome to Tuesday, Tuesday of yet another week. And we're going to break from, well, we're going to break somewhat from the discussions we've been having over the last 10 days or so about politics in Canada. And instead, we're going to focus on the fires in California, the wildfires, but using the wildfires in Jasper, Alberta last summer as a way of getting into the California story as well.

We're going to talk to the author of a new book that comes out next week that's all about the Jasper fires. We're going to hear his take on what's going on in California as well and how these two are similar and how they're different. Let's get to this story. Let me tell you a little bit about our guest coming up here in a moment. His name is Matthew Skace. He's a reporter in Alberta. He's working now for the Calgary Herald.

He's also worked for Canadian Press. He's written columns. You may well have read them, stories for a variety of different newspapers in Canada at different times, including the Globe and Mail. Young guy. I'm not sure exactly how old he is, but he's a young fellow, but he's been very focused on his career. He went to Queen's University. He worked for the Queen's student newspaper. He worked for the Kingston Whig Standard at one point. I'm not sure if he actually worked there, but he wrote for the Kingston Whig Standard.

But his home's in Calgary, or his home's in Alberta. And he's, you know, he was fascinated, as we all were, in the Jasper story last summer, the wildfires there. And he's written about them in a book called Jasper on Fire, Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise. And if you've ever been to Jasper you know it is certainly was a paradise and it will be again one day that book comes out

next week, a week from today actually Sutherland House Books and it really offers a timely perspective that Bridges-hand reporting on one of Canada's most catastrophic wildfires, this is the PR line, with critical insights on wildfire management in the age of escalating climate crises. And what a time for this book to come out, as we're, you know, have our eyes locked on these

incredible visuals coming out of California. So let's get to this interview, because Matt's case is a really interesting guy to listen to telling this story. And the best way to tell this is uninterrupted, right? So let's take our break before we start the interview so we won't have to take it during the interview, right? So we'll be right back right after this. And welcome back. Peter Mansbridge here with The Bridge for this Tuesday.

And our guest is Matthew Skace, who's a reporter with the Calgary Herald. And he's just written his new book, which comes out next week. Five Fire. It's week. Five, Fire. It's called Jasper on Fire, Five Days of Hell in a Rocky Mountain Paradise. So let's get to the interview right now. Looking forward to this discussion. Hope you are too. Here we go.

So, Matt, you spent most of the past year working on this book, and the focus is Jasper, of course, but obviously you couldn't ignore what you've just seen in the last days, last couple of weeks really in Los Angeles. When you've watched the wildfires in Los Angeles, what strikes you? What enters your mind given the way you spent the last year? Yeah. So, so I spent a lot of time with folks in Jasper after the fire. And I mean, the devastation that comes out of these events, it's, it's,

it's a real trauma for people. It's, you lose things that you uh will never get back so photos of family members photo albums um even just the places that you spent your childhood um i spent a good amount of time with jasper's mayor um and he lived in the same home pretty much for almost 70 years um and the just the the scale of loss when you lose something that close to you and not tied to your history is challenging. So when I looked at the California fires, I had a heartbroke for everyone involved

because you're losing something that's so close to your heart. The other thing that I noticed with the California fires, or wanted to learn more about, was how similar was this to Jasper? Were these two fires similar in certain ways? And they're, upon learning more about the California situation, they are very similar. So one thing we know is climate change is making our conditions drier than making them hotter. In Jasper, one thing you'll know in the book is that forest management has been a long-standing issue where we essentially decided that fire was not something we wanted in our forests. For many reasons, tourism, we don't like to see smoke. It makes people uncomfortable. But in doing so, we allowed these forests to grow to a point where they sort of become these massive tinderboxes.

And so Jasper was essentially a tinderbox waiting to blow. And it just was a matter of whether it would hit the town, which is a pretty small point on the map. And California has been experiencing recurring fires for several years. They seem to happen quite often, but the scale that it has happened has not been quite this great. This will be by far the biggest fire that I think the U.S. or North America has ever seen. So far what we know, and we'll probably learn a lot more because these fires are still

happening, these two fires do seem to be quite similar. You've mentioned a couple of things I want to pick up on. You know, the mayor of Jasper, his story, and you spent time with him. One of the images that I will, you know, never lose sight of in my mind is the image of the images that I will never lose sight of in my mind is the image of the mayor of Jasper on the day they let him back into town. And he's standing there looking at what's left of his home, which is basically nothing. It's a very moving picture, the expression on his face in the moment the camera caught him.

And it helps you identify with the points you were making the human loss in in situations like this we get consumed by you know stories about the fires stories about the you know the water bombers and uh and the firefighters and all heroic heroic people but at the end of the day it's people people like the mayor of Jasper who lost his home and lost all those memories that you talk about. The other thing I'm wondering about is, you know, like wildfires aren't, you know, aren't new. The rate at which they're happening now and the spread is quite something.

But it's always been an issue for like literally hundreds of years um did the indigenous did indigenous people deal with this situation differently is there anything to learn from that so just backtracking a little bit with the science of wildfires like you said we've had wildfires forever um the forest in jasper is built to burn that's one thing that when i started this book that's kind of the things i wanted to figure out is like are these forests supposed to burn about the answer is yes um and the way they're supposed to burn is in little pockets effectively so you have a fire that will flare up in a certain area and it'll kill basically

whatever is the oldest trees in that area. And then the younger ones, which have more moisture, they're younger, they won't burn as well. So you have these little pockets of fire and then you have this regeneration of the forest happening all the time. And so from what we know from research way back is that indigenous communities were aware of this and they let it happen and would bring the process along and continue the regrowth process. Around the early 1900s, when Jasper became a rail town, it was basically a few shacks. Indigenous people were taken away from that land and pushed out of Jasper National Park. One research paper from, I believe it was 1977, noted that right around that time is when wildfires seemed to stop happening in Jasper National Park. So it is really interesting to see that our wildfire practices as we as we know them to erase fire from the landscape because of tourism whatnot um basically made us more prone to these fires so that is one of these

factors that is coming up more and more is how do we get our forests in shape for fires and make them uh i guess less likely to hit our urban areas and get too far out of control like they did in Jasper, where it becomes basically a bowling ball coming straight towards a town that you can't stop. So how do you do that? You know, I remember Trump was made fun of quite considerably a few years ago when he said, oh, you've got to get out there and rake the forest land,

and that'll prevent forest fires. Now, some people said, well, you know, he's got a point there. He's probably not the way he's saying it, but there's an idea there. What is the way? How do you prevent this? It's a great question. There will probably be some more extreme measures, I think, taken around mountain towns in the future.

There had been a debate before the Jasper fire whether there should be a larger fire break in front of the town. Basically, a fire break is just removing the vegetation, i.e. the trees from areas close to town, which is a challenging idea for a tourism hot spot because you go there for the trees um and there are different opinions on whether that would have solved you know saved jasper from the fire but i presumably if you were to take away all the trees three kilometers out from jasper which would be a monumental task. That's not something you can just do with an eraser. Then you may have prevented this from happening.

But those are massive, massive projects to take on. You also have to think about the other effects and wildlife and everything. So that's one way that you can save at least urban areas from these kind of wildfires, because that's sort of the challenge we're dealing with California and Jasper is these fires are happening. They're supposed to happen, but when it gets really bad is when they, or when it becomes a an issue is when it hits urban structures and takes homes and ends up in a situation where I'm with California Jasper now.

The other thing that I hope gets more attention um but i think it's it's a very it's a kind of a boring task is fire smarting homes um because every firefighter i talked to in this book um would not stop talking about fire smart and i'd known about it before i started reporting on the book but i because it's sort of basically fire smarting is taking the brush away from your you know two meters away from your home making sure you don't have materials on your roof that could catch fire making sure you don't have flammable things on your porch like it's it's kind of boring stuff but it can make all the difference and we will see photos in California after this is all over of neighborhoods that are leveled and then one home or two homes that are still standing.

And there are wildfire experts. There's one person I talked to who is the vegetation specialist for Parks Canada all the way up into the mid 2010s, I believe. And this was his focus. He wanted to introduce fire back into the landscape in jasper national park by doing prescribed burns introducing those new pockets again um and then with the local fire chief trying to get people to fire smart their home so if a fire when a fire which is what their wording was is this fire is going to happen we just need to prepare for it uh like we need to have the homes ready so getting people to cut down

a tree that they love in front of their home um that would catch fire and and take their home down um it was not an easy task as they told me it's it's a really challenging thing to get people to proactively get ready for this thing because you don't also believe that this may ever happen to you it's very like thinking a fire is going to come to your home is like what are the odds you just don't know um but it's one of those things that every time i spoke to a wildfire fighter was we need to get really get much better at fire smarting and that might take action from the insurance industry or from uh new building codes from local governments. But that seems to be one of those things where we're not going to prevent wildfires from happening out in the woods because it's a really challenging thing to do.

But if we have them come hit our urban interface, how do we prepare for that? Or how do we prevent the type of loss we're experiencing in California? You know, I'm glad you brought this up because I've got a, I've got friends in Malibu and they're right on the, right on the ocean, right? You know, you've seen those pictures and homes are like side by each. They're really close together. You can barely slip a piece of paper in between the homes. And my friends, neighbors lost their home. Like adjacent to them, they lost their home. Their home barely had singe marks on it. And they'd gone into trouble of fire smarting.

And as you say, it's not just about cutting down vulnerable trees in front of you. It's about how you build the place. So that, one assumes, coupled with this whole issue surrounding insurance, is going to make people think twice, I hope, if they're living in zones that are vulnerable to this. So that issue will come aboard. In Jasper, was there talk of this fire smarting issue as well, not just by the firefighters, but by the residents of Jasper? Yes, to a degree.

But from what I understand, there were pockets that were, there were certain groups of people who were interested in this and there were local initiatives but people got engaged with here and there um but it's one of those things where it's sort of out of the good of your own heart if you have nothing to do on a saturday and there's a local book group doing something then you'll go do it maybe um and so mobilizing that initiative is pretty challenging um There's a little community just outside of Jasper that's on a lake, and it's right tucked in the woods. And they got this big fire smarting certification because everybody got on board.

But it's a really small group of people, and I'm sure there is a lot more. We're going to do this all together. And so the trouble, really, like you said about your friend Malibu is you, you can have a pocket of houses that are fire smarted, but if, you know, say even 50% are and 50% aren't, once you end up in a situation again, like in Jasper, California, where you have a hundred kilometer an hour winds, the homes that do catch fire are knocking over the homes next to them um and so you can fire smart all you want but if the home next to you is going wild and the wind's blowing

in its direction then you're you're in big trouble so you need you need full uh full support from the whole community at these things the the big problem in Los Angeles was the winds and the Santa Ana winds and upwards of 100 miles an hour. Was wind a contributing factor in Jasper? Absolutely. In Jasper, they were 100 plus kilometers an hour. One of the firefighters I spoke with was at jasper park lodge he was the firefighter uh he was the fire chief in jasper up until the late 2010s and then he was basically in charge of making sure jasper park lodge was ready for a fire and he saw a muskoka chairs flying through the air and at that point he's like i gotta get the hell out of here. Um, and when the fire's going that crazy, there's not really a lot you can do. Um, the winds pick up at that speed.

You have like trees being incinerated in minutes, um, which is having not witnessed it really hard to imagine. Like I wrote it into my book, but even so, like it's just hard to imagine what that looks like. Um, and then the other thing, um, that I think is, is probably lesser known with fires is that the fire doesn't actually hit the town as in like a, you know, slapping the town in the face. It's embers that are flying overhead and landing into the town. So you have embers from probably several kilometers away jumping into Jasper. It's not the fire sort of creeping up and hitting the doorstep.

It's all these embers landing over the town. So when you have winds like that, too, I mean, you are just, you were getting rained on. The fire chiefs that I spoke with in Jasper,per too when they were in the fire that night when everybody's watching parks canvas communications they had basically rains of embers falling on them and falling on roofs that if the roofs are made of cedar which they are in jasper because or many of them were because uh building codes back in the 70s wanted them to look idyllic and mountainous whatever um those things light on fire and then boom you have a house fire and you're off to the races it's it just turns into a rodeo

so when they rebuild jasper is it going to be rebuilt to look like a tourist town is it going to be rebuilt to deal with what's part of life now it will be uh both they they released new architectural guidelines because um i mean it's a fascinating sort of piece of jasper's history is reading the architectural guidelines from the uh 70s and 80s and 90s when they wanted it to look a very very specific way put you know small windows so they're little windows that look out into the mountains they're sort of like little paintings like they wanted small windows um and then one of the features they wanted especially early on were cedar shake roofs um because they look they're lovely they they're these nice little slats that are made of wood um but further into the 80s and 90s when

wildfires started to pick up a little bit, and especially in the 2000s, they realized that that was a really bad idea. And they took it off. But with the new guidelines, they are very, very clear that you cannot have flammable materials on your homes. So they do have very specific architectural guidelines of how they want Jasper homes to look. But at the same time, they're being very careful about the flammable material. So there's a whole new section on that now. At its core, is this a story about, and you've got to pick one here, Matt. You can't just sort of say it's a little bit of all of them.

But at its core, is this a story about people? Is it a story about fire? Or is it a story about climate change? You're making me take one. Yeah. I would say this is a story about people because these problems are, you are, they're experienced by the people who live there. And that's,

that's sort of what the book was setting out to do because I was given quite a tight timeline to finish the thing. And the story that I felt like was necessary to tell, especially at the time, because it was so soon after the fire, was that these people are in the middle of this. I should get that. Like, the point of the book is to tell the stories of what it's like to go through something. So I'm country i think i mean i'm speaking from alberta everyone

was watching that night i think a lot of people are gonna remember where they were in that moment and i think a lot of people want to know where other people were and what was happening to them um one thing about the jasper fire that has been very different about the california fires in my view has been that jasper once it cleared out and nobody was there except for the firefighters, we didn't really know what was happening. We were getting the auto alert from Parks Canada saying, this is what's happening. We've been working overnight. We've been working through the day. Winds are expected to pick up.

But there were no visuals. There were no iPhone videoshone videos whatever going around social media for the most part um and then the night that the fire happened we have these communications coming up from parks canada say that we have removed all the wildfire fighters anybody without a breathing apparatus is leaving there were people in town but i think there was a belief that nobody was there at all but we didn't know what it looked like we didn't know what the scene was so uh i mean the thing with this book for me was that i kind of wanted to bring us back in there and see what it was like for the firefighters

for these people who have lived in jasper the whole lives and were trying to hose down the homes that they had seen for decades or grown up in um because those are again those are the people um who who were trying to save the town they were all most of them were all volunteer fighter firefighters um and a lot of them had grown up in the area um and then you have all these people who are dislocated out in Belmont or Prince George or in Calgary. Um, so I will answer that question, uh,

saying it's about people, um, but it's the people who are managing the fire and managing, trying to manage the effects of climate change. Um, because it's, um, I don't know. It was a, it was a really, really interesting

and fascinating story to tell. Do you think our knowledge of or acceptance of the fact that climate change is changing our lives and the way we live, you know, has been made stronger or more likely as a result of things like Jasper and now watching what's happening in Los Angeles? I hope so. The thing about Los Angeles that has been a little bit disturbing has been the level of misinformation going around.

And it's been, I mean, researching for this interview and just learning exactly what is happening. Like I said earlier on, I want to know what the similarities were between Jasper and Los Angeles. But there is so much stuff flying around on the internet. And what I was saying about Jasper being a black box and not understanding what was happening on a deep level that night of the fire is almost like we have the exact opposite here in Los Angeles. We are seeing every moment we're getting citizens with their phones taking photos of their homes burning.

And there's just so much information out there. But on the whole, I hope that we're learning the right lessons with California. It's still happening. Like we're still in the middle of this thing. And what I hope is that we get up with a sober conversation about how we prepare for these things with the BC floods three years ago. Afterwards, I felt like there was a pretty significant conversation about adaptation and figuring out how we prepare for events like these, because we know they're

going to happen again. And so I do hope in California and in Jasper and Canada, we understand the risks and how this will happen again. It doesn't, we don't know where, but it will. So I hope, I really, really hope, because we're definitely in a new era now. I think we've had two defining wildfires in the past seven months for the country. I don't want to disregard Fort McMurray in 2016, but these two ones have seemed to caught people's attention. Here's my last question, and it reverts back to the issue of people.

Watching the coverage of Los Angeles, and I agree, it's a lot of disinformation out there, but one of the things that has been striking and has made kind of heroic figures out of these people are watching the water bombers, the Canadian water bombers, and those pilots and some of the extraordinary things they do when picking up water and banking almost immediately as soon as they lift off the waves. What can you tell us about those people,

whether it's water bombers or helicopters or bigger aircraft that are dropping fire retardant? I don't know whether you had a chance to talk to any of them or hear their stories. What should we know about people like that? That is a great question. Cause that's one of those things that I was really interested in when I started writing and reporting for this.

I was like what's going through someone's mind when they are either putting out a fire in a country that's not their own, or they're putting out a fire that they have a very deep emotional connection to. So when I met with a couple of Jasper's deputy fire chiefs, I was trying to get a sense for what was going through their mind that night and that whole week when they were preparing for the fire to come to their hometown. And everyone's different. The firefighters all have their own perspectives on this.

There were ones who didn't want to speak with me. It was just a really emotional time for them. And that is more than okay. And then you have other firefighters who are very matter of fact, because they, they believe that they have a job to do in this situation and they, they park their feelings for that particular moment of those several, several hours that they're up overnight trying to fight a fire and they just get a job done. And I was,

I found it remarkable as someone who's probably a little more emotional than them, how they're able to do that. Because they're also dealing with in the instance of Jasper, homes of people that they know, they probably know where everybody lives. And so you're not even just dealing with taking care of your own home or watching your own home burn, but deciding what to do with your neighbor's home, whether you bulldoze it to try to prevent the next fire

from going to the next home. And those decisions, I mean, I just, I can't imagine what that would be like, but they have a very clinical view of how they approach that situation. And it's incredibly impressive what these people are able to do under incredible amounts of pressure. They also have a, I guess a sense of humor in a way where they're just sort of very matter of fact about, well, this is, this is where I am. And, oh, it's starting,

you know, they, one of the guys guys when I was speaking to him about the night of the Jasper fire, they had this massive crane type thing that's spraying water on downtown to make sure all the businesses were saved. And he was saying when it started to rain, he thought it was just the water coming down from their sprinkler. And he's like, we were down to our trousers and water. And, you know, there's a weird humor about it where they're sort of trying to keep things light in a moment of really, I think, devastation. And then they just keep on trucking. They sort of wanted the next thing. And I don't know. I don't think we can thank them enough.

And they're the type of people who would never take credit for it um i think is the main thing that you they would never try to stand up and say i i saved jasper um they don't really want that credit um they're just there to as they see do a job and what we tend to forget at times um is whether they're fighting the fires from the ground or from the air this This is like dangerous work. It's really dangerous. And sadly, you know, we know the result of that in some cases. But you're right. We can't thank these people enough.

Listen, Matt, I know you spend a lot of time, obviously, and I know what it's like to sit there and write a book. And it's not easy. It's hard work. But let me tell you, the hardest work is now ahead of you in selling the book and going on book tours and doing interviews and that. That's hard work. But I think just from listening to your stories in this interview, this is going to be a book well worth reading. So I do appreciate your time. Thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks for having me, Peter. Appreciate it. So there you go. The name of the book, once again, is Fire, Jasper on Fire, Five Days of Hail in a Rocky Mountain Paradise. And the author, our guest today, Matthew Skace, journalist and author now, works for the Calgary Herald and Canadian Press, and his writings have been seen

in various places around the country. So good for Matthew, and thanks for his time today and being on the program. And that was Matt Skace, author of the book Jasper on Fire. It's out now, just out a couple of days. We did him last week. This was our encore edition for this week. Fascinating guy, right?

Quite the story he has to tell about Jasper and linking it to the California fires as well. So there you go. Tomorrow it's your turn, and we've got lots and lots of letters on this question of, what's your happy? Where do you go for your happy? Got to have them in by 6 p.m. this evening.

I can already warn you, we have lots of letters already this week, good ones, because they follow the rules. Name, location, keep it short. Have it in by 6 p.m. Eastern time today. Looking forward to talking to you tomorrow. Bye for now.