Hurry Up and Wait: Forest Fires and Disaster Prevention

The year I started working as an Assistant Fire Management Clerk, I was a shy 19-year-old, timidly running radio communications for the Thunder Bay District’s wildland fire operations. I got over my shyness quickly, however, as that year Ontario experienced its worst fire season on record. 2021’s “drought-like” conditions brought on more fires than usual, burning hotter and moving faster than could be suppressed. Kenora 51 (the 51st fire in the Kenora district that year), a 200,000-hectare fire, became the largest ever recorded in Ontario, and hundreds of remote First Nations community members were forced to evacuate. Some went a relatively short distance to Thunder Bay, while others were dislocated thousands of kilometres away from their homes to Cornwall, Toronto, and Sudbury – a reminder of just how far one can be displaced within a single province.  

With fire weather becoming increasingly volatile in the climate crisis, predicting labour and resource needs for the fire season can be difficult. There’s a phrase often repeated in the fire management headquarters: “hurry up and wait.” It refers to the fact that a lot of the job is preparing to respond at a moment’s notice – and then waiting around, at that same level of any-moment-now readiness, until it does. 2021 was followed up by a remarkably slow fire season in 2022, where it was all waiting and no hurry. This meant no large, destructive fires, but it also meant no overtime or hands-on experience for fire crews, a deciding factor in retention for a seasonal job whose start pay has only recently been increased to $25.58 a hour – 1.5 times minimum wage, compared to 2 times minimum wage 20 years ago.  

Come 2023, Canada’s worst fire season on record, bases across Ontario were understaffed, underexperienced and overworked. Fires across the country resulted in destruction and displacement, exacerbated by a lack of experienced crew leaders and resources spread too thin across a country that was suddenly experiencing fire disasters across multiple provinces at the same time. As the Toronto Star’s Marco Oved explains, this climate change-fueled “new breed of fire… used to be a career” but is now a summer job where “a lack of experience can be deadly.” Mainstream media that year relayed stories of falling trees and helicopter crashes resulting in the deaths of several fire rangers over the course of the season, not to mention the countless untold stories that were less sensational, but no less destructive. 

[Screen grab of NRCan’s interactive map, displaying Canada’s active fires as of July 7, 2025.] 

2025 is shaping up to rival 2023, with forecasts of severe fire weather in western provinces in July and August. Evacuees from Saskatchewan and Manitoba are only now beginning to return home, the former province’s two largest fires having burnt 4700 square kilometres combined, or an area 40 times the size of Saskatoon. Red Lake 12, a fire rivalling the aforementioned Kenora 51 in size, has resulted in evacuations from multiple communities, with news coverage displaying dramatic scenes like workers sheltering from the blaze in a shipping container. Meanwhile, Ontario’s fire crew outfit is 45 crews and 100 fire rangers below its ideal staffing. Compounded by a lack of experience, seasonal rather than permanent positions, and climate changed-induced fire weather, the current labour shortage across Canada’s wildfire operations negatively affects response time and increases the risk of large, destructive fires that place fire rangers in danger and require evacuations.  

[Photo credits to Neil Gillespie/Facebook via CBC.]  

On the ground, less human resources means even worst devastations for the most vulnerable communities. Specifically, for First Nations communities forced to evacuate, these disasters are becoming all too common while risk management is worsening. As explained in a 2022 auditor’s report on emergency management in First Nations communities, “First Nations communities are about 18 times more likely than non-Indigenous communities to be evacuated during an emergency because of their remoteness, location in fire- and flood-prone areas, aging infrastructure, and challenging socio-economic situations” (15). The report also found that Indigenous Services Canada spends 3.5 times more on disaster recovery than on prevention, a “more reactive than preventative” (3) approach that, without change, means First Nations will continue to experience disasters that “could be averted” (4).  

Nick Leeson and Alexys Santos, lawyers with Indigenous self-governance-focused law firm Woodward & Company, explain how historical criminalization of traditional fire stewardship practices, through measures such as British Columbia’s Bush Fire Act of 1874, has left First Nations without the capacity to manage forest health in their own territories. In Ontario, Dan Johnston’s article for the Forest History Society of Ontario describes how the 1917 Forest Fires Prevention Act implemented a stringent suppression mandate, which over time has left forests vulnerable to insect infestations and wind damage. all changing the “fire regime,” or fire behaviour in a certain area, and creating a wilderness highly reactive to the extreme conditions caused by the climate crisis and resource extraction.  

When smoke settled over Ottawa’s downtown in early June, it felt, in a strange way, like home. That nostalgia for scratchy lungs and eerie, beautiful sunsets, so familiar to anyone raised up north, betrays a staggering privilege, an ability to retreat inside and remark on the shocking heat and humidity while benefiting from the very processes – fossil fuel extraction, logging, and mining – accelerating climate disasters. How, then, do we think about fires – tangible, dramatic disasters you can see, measure and smell – alongside the other disasters shadowing them, those of labour shortages and legislative neglect; in other words, disasters of inaction? How do we treat fire disasters as, in the words of feminist ecology scholar Astrida Neimanis, “absolute wrongs that obligate us to act, and not simply as unfortunate tragedies that leave us bereft” (476)? How does the haze of smoke, stretching across the continent, remind us to act as if the fire is here, too?  

– Charlotte Johnston, Special Contributor to The Disaster Lab.