Opinion: Ride the lightning

It happens to all of us.

A song wriggles into your brain and just sort of sticks there, refusing to leave for whatever reason.

Maybe you even hum it and sing it softly to yourself until it annoys everyone around you (yourself included).

These earworms can seemingly come from anywhere—but lately all of mine have been unearthed by work.

For instance, when Pemberton’s Mark Mendonca shared a photo of some bears using the crosswalk at Pemberton Portage Road with the caption “Abbey Road,” I was stuck humming “Come Together”—the opening track of that famous Beatles album—for two days straight.

A couple weeks prior, it was a cover feature written by Alyssa Noel, which doomed me to sing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to myself for two solid weeks because of its headline alone (“Mountain Mamas Keep on Moving”… oh no it’s happening again).

But this week, my research is driving an altogether different genre into my brain—classic Aussie rock, and the iconic, unmistakeable opening riff to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”

(I’ll pause here to allow sufficient time for you to hear it in your mind’s ear yourself. It’s still pretty badass, even after all these years, eh?)

That classic AC/DC riff made its home in my head on the evening of July 12, when a lightning storm passed over the Sea to Sky sparking a series of small blazes.

No fewer than six ignited in the Pemberton area, and one north of Whistler—all of which were contained and/or snuffed out in a matter of days (thank you, attentive fire-spotters and courageous BC Wildfire Service members).

“Lightning has posed a serious challenge for us so far this summer, much more so than human-caused starts … The recent convective activity across the province underscores just how impactful lightning can be when we have experienced prolonged drought conditions,” said Sarah Budd, provincial wildfire info officer with the BC Wildfire Service.

From July 6 to 13, B.C. saw more than 51,000 lightning strikes, she added—posing a major challenge for firefighters in B.C.

To that end, the province has made significant investments in recent years for work on fuel treatments, preparedness, and cultural and prescribed fire, Budd said.

“We work closely with communities, First Nations, industry, and stakeholders to reduce wildfire risks and help keep people and communities safe by promoting the Community Resiliency Investment program,” she said.

“We also recognize fire as a natural ecological process on the landbase. In collaboration with partners, we use cultural and prescribed fire as an essential part of reducing wildfire risk to communities, sustaining biodiversity, maintaining productive and adaptive ecosystems, and supporting the cultural practices of Indigenous peoples.”

Mitigating risk is a shared responsibility, Budd added, noting that individual residents can help by ensuring their properties are FireSmart.

In Whistler, wildfire mitigation is guided by the Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan, which was adopted in April 2022 and lays out an extensive list of 32 recommendations focusing on several areas, including: education, community planning, development considerations, interagency cooperation, FireSmart training, emergency planning, and vegetation management (read more at whistler.ca/wildfire).

As this article was being written, 2023 officially became the worst wildfire season on record in B.C., and the province’s four worst wildfire seasons have come in the last six years—the other three being 2021 (1,647 fires, burning 869,300 hectares; 59 per cent lightning-caused); 2017 (1,353 and 1,216,053 hectares; 57 per cent); and 2018 (2,117 and 1,354,284; 70 per cent).

As of July 13, about 61 per cent of 2023’s fires were suspected to be naturally-caused, slightly above the 10-year average of 58 per cent.

But as the climate changes, lightning is a growing concern as it relates to wildfire, in Whistler and across Canada.

Mike Flannigan, then-University of Alberta professor and director of the Canadian Partnership for Wildland Fire Science, touched on the topic at a wildfire conference Pique attended in Nelson in 2018.

“Work done in the U.S. suggests for every degree of warming, there’s an increase of about 12 per cent in lightning activity,” Flannigan said, noting that similar studies hadn’t been done for Canada, but would likely produce similar numbers.

Warming temperatures also increase the atmosphere’s ability to suck moisture from forest fuels.

“Now, unless there’s an increase in precipitation, which can compensate for this, our fuels will be drier,” Flannigan said, adding that studies show that, for every degree of warming, you would need about 15-per-cent more precipitation to keep the forests sufficiently wet.

“So let’s say this region warms two, three degrees, that means you need a 30- to 45-per-cent increase of precipitation during the fire seasons,” he said.

“And from what we’ve seen that’s not going to happen.”

Then there’s the fun phenomenon known as pyrocummulus thunderstorms, in which a wildfire generates its own weather, and creates its own lightning—in turn triggering more fire starts.

According to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Canada has had at least 90 of those so far this year. The previous record was reportedly 102 for the entire globe.

So mitigation and preparation are crucial. As is reducing human-caused ignitions to the best of our collective ability.

That means adhering to local and regional fire bans, being responsible with smoking materials, and reporting all fires by calling 1-800-663-5555 toll-free or *5555 on a cellphone.

In the meantime, there are a small handful of websites and apps you can use to track suspected lightning-strikes. A fun game to play during a storm is to watch the dots pop up on the map and worry about which ones might lead to a fire in our bone-dry forests.

While you do that, you can listen to quintessentially ’90s band Live, and their hit “Lightning Crashes.”

It’s not as iconic as “Thunderstruck,” but some might say it hits just as hard when the bassline drops and the chorus comes in.

Other lightning-related songs that got stuck in the author’s head during the writing of this column include “Crying Lightning,” by Arctic Monkeys, and of course, “Ride the Lightning,” by Metallica. An honourable mention to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which might have also got stuck if only it were a bit more electric (sorry).