For a hundred years, fire suppression policies prevented necessary fires from occurring in the West, creating a buildup of fuel. Today’s hotter and drier conditions are priming those fuels, making them more combustible.
My question: Is this something we should be planning for further east?
I always assumed that we are too wet here or it's different tree species leading to the forest fire problem out west, from Yukon down to southern California.
But then this summer parts of Quebec and The Maritimes went up in flames. Could we start seeing major fires in southern Ontario, and heavily wooded reaches of the northern US (Maine, NY, Michigan, Minnesota)? What about further south in the Appalachians?
What makes the west different is that it historically should have been burning, and yet those burns were artificially prevented for a century. In the east, the forests were mostly cut down for agriculture, and have only returned in recent decades because agriculture shifted to the midwest. So while the east will have wildfires, I don't think they'll have the bonus severity of western wildfires because there hasn't been a century of buildup.
We get minor brush fires in the spring during dry spells and I have seen fire watchtowers (mostly abandoned) all over the northeast. But nothing on a giant scale in my adult lifetime.
My question: Is this something we should be planning for further east?
I always assumed that we are too wet here or it's different tree species leading to the forest fire problem out west, from Yukon down to southern California.
But then this summer parts of Quebec and The Maritimes went up in flames. Could we start seeing major fires in southern Ontario, and heavily wooded reaches of the northern US (Maine, NY, Michigan, Minnesota)? What about further south in the Appalachians?