They Took Down the Fire Towers
Peter MacIsaac spent 29 years on the fire line. He says the smoke over your house is a policy decision. | Episode 297
The Americans are annoyed with us.
That’s the polite version. What actually happened is that Canadian smoke drifted south, negotiations got tense, and somebody in Washington said out loud that it’s hard to make deals with a country that can’t manage its own forests. Feelings were hurt. Statements were issued.
And my first thought was: they’re not wrong, and I know exactly who to call.
Peter MacIsaac fought wildland fire for the Nova Scotia government for 29 years. He was a game warden. He was a trained wildfire investigator. He was incident commander on more than a hundred fires, including some big ones north of us up toward Edmonton. He’s 68, he’d rather be hunting and fishing, and he keeps writing books because he can’t stand watching this happen.
The new one is called Don’t Die in Wildfires. He came back on the show to talk about it, and about the part nobody in government wants discussed.
The 2010 problem
Here’s Peter’s argument, and it’s the cleanest version of it I’ve heard him make.
If you genuinely believed the climate was going to hand you more and bigger fires, what would you do? You’d buy more equipment. You’d hire more people. You’d build more capacity. That’s not ideology, that’s just arithmetic.
Starting around 2010, he says, Canadian provinces did the opposite. Firefighting budgets came down. In Nova Scotia around 2013 they took down the fire towers — low-tech, worked 100% of the time, better than anything electronic anybody’s managed to replace them with. Gone. The full-time helitack team went too.
If you’ve never worked a fire, the helitack team is the whole ballgame. They’re the tip of the spear — a small crew of highly trained people dropped in by helicopter, often rappelling down on ropes, hitting a fire while it’s still four or five hectares. They’re on it and putting water on it before ground crews can even get close. Peter said that down east, the helitack crew would routinely be working a fire for an hour before anybody on the ground arrived.
Take them away and those same four-hectare fires become fifteen-thousand-hectare fires. Sixty-thousand-hectare fires.
Which is exactly the pattern Peter says shows up in the national data after 2010: fewer fires, but far bigger ones.
That’s not a climate signature. That’s a response-time signature.
What we’re buying instead
This is the part that made me put my head in my hands.
The de Havilland DHC-515 — the successor to the CL-415, the best water bomber anybody makes — is being built right here in Calgary. In bulk. Peter says Canada isn’t scheduled to take delivery of any of them until roughly 2032, because Europe looked at the same shortage, saw where they were being manufactured, and got in line first.
We build the best firefighting aircraft in the world and we can’t have any for six years.
Meanwhile in Nova Scotia they just bought new helicopters — and not one of them can deliver a helitack team. They leased four fixed-wing aircraft off New Brunswick for a $6.5 million budget lease, and they aren’t skimmers. Every single drop, they have to fly back to an airport, land, take on water and fuel, and fly out again. A helicopter can be fuelled on site. These can’t.
New Brunswick was getting rid of them because New Brunswick figured out they needed pontoons.
The five-day story
In 2023, Nova Scotia had record fires. The Premier was in the press every day asking for help.
Peter put together a team of recently retired professionals — five or six guys, more than 200 years of combined experience — and offered to deploy inside the incident command system in overhead positions. Not on the nozzle. They know they’re past that. Command and coordination roles, where 200 years of experience is worth something.
Turned down. Five days in a row. While the Premier was on television asking for help.
He made a video about it. It went around the world.
What you can actually do
Here’s why I keep having Peter on. He doesn’t stop at the diagnosis.
His position is that if you live in forested Canada — and once you’re a hundred miles north of the U.S. border, that’s most of us — it isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. So the book is a field manual, and you can start today.
The five feet closest to your house is the most dangerous ground on your property. Dried brush, a woodpile stacked against the wall — a fire blows through and your house is gone. He works outward from there in three zones, all laid out in the book.
Roughly 90% of homes lost in a wildfire are lost to embers, not to a wall of flame arriving at your door. Which means most of what saves a house happens before you leave: windows shut, duct tape over the vents, air exchangers off.
Buy a cheap above-ground pool. Four or five hundred dollars. Fill it in spring when the wells are high. That’s a couple thousand extra gallons sitting on your property, and if you look after it, it lasts years.
Lay out five or six garden hoses with the taps on. When a crew comes through, they can’t save every house. They save the ones where they can knock down an ember fire without stopping to run their own lines.
Two escape routes, not one — and drive them. When did you last actually drive the road you’re planning to leave on? Construction and downed trees don’t send warnings.
Go bags in both vehicles. Peter’s got one in his, his wife has one in hers. Medications especially. People evacuate without the prescriptions they can’t live without and then find out how long Jasper residents were away from home.
Two-way radios, about $150, with the channels written on the side in Sharpie, for when the grid’s down and the phones don’t work. I picked mine up at Costco.
And the one that ties it together: run the drill. A couple of hours with your family, once, so everyone knows their job. Because the goal is to be the household that makes the evacuate-or-defend call in the first two minutes instead of the household that panics.
Peter also runs through how a private citizen can use the same Incident Command System governments use — you and your neighbours, radios, assigned roles, everybody knowing who does what when the alert comes through. It’s a military structure and there’s no reason a rural road can’t run it.
The last word
Peter’s expecting a knock on the door one of these days over what he writes. He’s not being dramatic about it — he just says that once a book is in your hands, they can’t censor it. One copy can pass through a hundred people.
That’s the same reason I started this project three years ago and archive every episode offline.
Get the book. It’s the price of a couple of coffees at Starbucks for something that will very likely matter in your lifetime. And if it helps you, go leave him a review — that’s how the algorithm carries it further, and Peter’s fairly confident the Canadian government would rather it didn’t.
Full episode is up now on YouTube and Rumble.
Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel.
— Bruce
