Fire Weather

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An all-consuming, suspenseful account of one of North America’s most devastating forest fires—and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. Amazingly, nobody died, but it was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. In this rich, multifaceted community portrait, John Vaillant recounts the stories of families and neighbors confronting a new magnitude of threat, while also bringing us deep inside the conflagration itself, describing with extraordinary precision the inner workings of fire, the ruthless mechanics of its spread, and the strategies firefighters have developed on the fly to counter the monstrous forces. Fire Weather deepens our understanding of these natural catastrophes and how they result from climate change—and why we are now living in a new century of fire.