“Impossible to let our guard down”: BJ Fuchs, an Alberta farmer, is still marked by the fight against the fire of recent days, which spared his property, but not the surrounding fields and forests. All the pens intended for his cows are empty and immersed in thick smoke. You can’t see five meters away.
“The fire was really powerful, it’s quite scary when the flames are so close to you,” says the man, cowboy hat on his head, wearing a beard of a few days. Shortly before the arrival of the flames, he managed, with his son, to evacuate his entire herd of nearly 1,000 head. On his land, near the manure spread to stop the fire, smoke still rises from a pile of burnt spruce and poplar wood.
The province of Alberta has been affected since the beginning of May by fires of unprecedented magnitude, which have already burned more than 400,000 hectares. The province declared a state of emergency and asked for help from the federal government. Some 70 fires were still active on Friday, including twenty out of control.
“It’s going to be a constant battle until we have a lot more rain, that’s for sure,” he added, saying he feared the return of high temperatures forecast for this weekend. Like his neighbours, he is on the alert and constantly surveying the fields, to watch for fire outbreaks. He is sorry for the dry state of all nature around.
The province, one of the largest oil-producing regions in the world, is also a rural area with many farms. Nearly half are cattle farms like that of BJ Fuchs. Alberta also produces a lot of wheat, grains and oilseeds.
“There are literally hundreds of thousands of animals that are potentially affected due to the vastness of the area” of the fires, explained Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta.
” Hopeless “
Watering the buildings, installing huge pools of water, cutting brush to try to make fire barriers… all the farmers are hard at work.
“It’s hopeless, we don’t know where it’s going to stop, or if it’s going to stop,” says Jessee Crowthers, also a cattle farmer who saw part of his neighbor’s farm go up in smoke. “There is always something,” he laments, referring to the natural disasters that repeatedly hit the region, in the midst of torched tractors and agricultural machinery.
“Drought, hail, heavy rain — we take whatever comes and we keep going,” adds the broad-built man, black cap on his head.
This unprecedented fire season comes after difficult years marked in particular by a severe drought in 2021, which caused the harvest to drop almost everywhere in the center and west of the country, reducing agricultural yields by 40%. That year, a “historic” heat dome claimed hundreds of lives and was followed by major fires.
recurring events
In recent years, western Canada has been hit by extreme weather events, the intensity and frequency of which have been increased by climate change.
For the fires, you have no choice but to be “prepared”, says farmer Trent Stanley, because “local firefighters, who are volunteers, take half an hour to get to the station and another half -hour to get here, but by the time that happens, your property is gone.”
The help of the inhabitants is therefore sometimes crucial. In particular, the authorities have asked farmers this year to clear and sow as much as possible because this allows them to bury fuel sources and therefore slow the spread of fires. But for cattle, there is sometimes nothing to do.
“It’s impossible for me” to move them. “This spring, I have 850 beef cows. It’s not as if we could load them in a few minutes, ”laments this farmer with a large cowboy hat. “I imagine the plan might be to open the fences and maybe the cattle would know where to go, but I doubt that,” he said.