Village of Lytton, B.C., evacuated as mayor says 'the whole town is on fire' | Hacker News Reader

Village of Lytton, B.C., evacuated as mayor says 'the whole town is on fire'

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Lytton BC hit 49.6 degrees yesterday.

For perspective:

China's all time high temp record: 50.5 degrees. Australia: 50.7

Canada broke its heat record 3 days in a row.

486 Sudden deaths in BC during this heat wave, 3x the normal # of sudden deaths.

Are you sure you’re not quoting the surface temperature for Lytton as opposed to the air temperature?

No. That was the temperature of the damn air. It's nuts.

It's air temperature: https://twitter.com/ECCCWeatherBC/status/1410017678216024067

> Are you sure you’re not quoting the…

Yes.

https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/daily_data_e.html...

yikes... been through weather like that in Australia a couple of times. but yeah I can't imagine houses and people (and animals) in Canada are accustomed or designed to handling anywhere near that.

> I can’t imagine the […] people […] in Canada are accustomed

Absolutely not. I don’t live in Lytton, but close, and similarly hot. What is usually called a hot spell would be 34, 35, maybe 36 degrees. The last 3 days we’re well into the 40’s, approaching 50. I went out today and it was about 46 degrees. It hurt my eyes of all things. It’s brutally hot, and by the time I was done (I walked down to river to check temperature, maybe 20-30 minutes) I was spent. Not for this Canadian.

> houses

Well, we get hot summers, and cold winters, so houses should be well insulated (which serves both hot and cold) and air conditioners are common. So not completely unprepared, though it can be hard for A/C to keep up.

Edit: As I think of it, the Fraser Valley was fantastically hot, as was the rest of the lower mainland, which is usually mild weather (typical “pacific north west”) and I think less likely to have A/C installed. The Interior/Okanagan (Incl Lytton) are used to long hot summers, but not 50 degrees.

We hit 46 in some parts of Maple Ridge, a suburb of Vancouver. It was brutal - when I hosed the kids off in the back yard some birds parked themselves in the mist and just sat there with open beaks. It's cooled back down now.

BC is certainly home to a lot of folks with no a/c, 'hike snowcap mountains in a sweater' type of people that've never experienced 40-45+ weather!

Village is the right way to characterise this place. About ten blocks big. Still can't believe they gave up the town this easily.

From The Article:

"It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere."

They didn't give up. They got chased out without notice. By fire.

There's been fire in the area for days. Did they have any sprinklers set up? Fire guards being built? No. I don't think they had any resources there until now which is too late obviously.

It's... Canada. BC. Shall we also fault Nepal for being unprepared for tsunamis?

This is fire county, so we’re perhaps more prepared than Nepal is for Tsunamis, but still Lytton apparently has 1 fire truck, there are fires all over the province so we’re not all just focusing on Lytton, and this swept the town in ~15 minutes. Sprinklers aren’t going to cut it. These are massive fires.

You should see what we do in Alberta when a town is under threat. Forestry sprinklers all over, town goes into fire smart mode, all brush cleared and so on. We learned a lot when slave lake and Fort mac burned.

Read their comment history -- they're a climate change denier. Some people just want to watch the world burn, I guess.

Did you read it? I don't deny it's changing, it is. I typically quote the authoritative reports that show it's not as dyer as alarmists would make you believe.

*dire

BC has a history of massive forest fires every summer.

2020: 347,104 hectares

2019: 21,138 hectares

2018: 1,354,284 hectares

2017: over 1.2 million hectares

2016: 91,817 hectares

2015: no global summary

2014: 360,000 hectares

Source: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/ab...

2017 and 2018 were exceptional but the trend going back decades is less hectares burned every decade. This is true world wide.

I've planted six hundred hectares myself to give you perspective, these burns are easily replanted where desirable.

BC had more than a millions acres burned a couple years ago. 85% of the damn province is forest, ravaged by beetle. Lots of tinder just waiting to catch fire, no excuse.

> China's all time high temp record: 50.5 degrees. Australia: 50.7

Those temperatures were, not surprisingly, recorded in desert climates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpan#Climate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodnadatta#Climate

This is something else entirely…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton,_British_Columbia#Clima...

Phoenix, Arizona’s all-time record is 50.

When I look up pictures of Arizona I see cacti and deserts. Lytton is hot but it’s a lot of forests and lakes. Would an equivalent be Arizona getting a severe Canadian winter with 1-2 weeks of -40 ?

Southern BC is very much a desert and barely sees any snow in winter, yet negative temperature.

Source: I have family in Osoyoos.

Southern BC just barely qualifies as a desert (9.8" of annual rain in Osoyoos vs. 10" to qualify as a desert) ;)

But yeah Osoyoos is wildly similar in architecture/vibe to parts of AZ/NM.

> Southern BC just barely qualifies as a desert

Give it a decade or two?

Southern BC leeward of the mountains, that is.

Maybe not quite that extreme. Something like a few days or a week with highs like 32 - 38 °C is not that unusual in much of southern Canada, including that part of BC. Still a solid ten degrees hotter than what would be considered very hot normally.

On 10 July 1913, temperatures at the aptly named Furnace Creek area in the California desert reached a blistering 56.7°C (134.1°F).

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/move-over-death-vall....

I live in Victoria, on the water, and this past Sunday and Monday were the hottest days I’ve ever experienced. Nicaragua in the summer wasn’t that hot. The European heat wave of 2018 wasn’t that hot. My friend who just moved here from Johannesburg said he’s never been that hot. People were baking cookies inside their cars. I was worried to leave my pets home during the day in case the inside temperature went too high. The lake that we swim in to cool off was bathtub warm.

And Lytton was 10 degrees hotter than that.

Tweets on this are horrifying https://twitter.com/coltondavies_/status/1410463746896527362...

I know climate is a thing but is there local phenomena explaining this, like the polar vortices that made the US colder than normal?

The article says it's very dry and they're expecting low precipitation thunderstorms which will sadly probably lead to new fires.

e: Article didn't say but this one did: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/temperatures-ease-in-b-c-as-al...

Apparently there is a big dome of heat trapped between mountain ranges, like a giant bubble. A combination of pressure and geography means air can't penetrate as easily to move it on, so it's just sitting, and getting hotter.

Yes, these sorts of things happen in that region. And that is the mechanism causing it. But it typically means highs of like 35 or 38 and maybe one day going up to 40. (Temperatures like that would normally be considered very hot.) Day after day over 45 is a shocking idea to me as a Canadian, let alone a record high of 49.6. Been all over the country and I've never experienced hotter than 40 °C myself, and briefly.

So the mechanism is normal but there is just more energy being pumped into the system lately? That sounds crazy to me given the latitude but the geography explanation makes sense. The article said it's like a giant Death Valley.

My understanding is the hot air is high pressure, meaning no cold air can get in, and the mountains block movement of the system as a whole. This implies to me that the hotter it gets the more 'sticky' it might get in staying around for longer. Not sure if that's true but thunderstorms in dry heat are never great, they're a regular source of fires.

This morning - Lightning storm sparks dozens of fires, evacuation alert at Deka Lake, BC:

https://www.castanet.net/news/Kamloops/338740/Lighting-storm...

I live in BC but I’m from South America and for me it felt like a summer back home, I was surprised to see so many people passed away this weekend

Is it really normal to have temperatures in the 35-49 range there? I can’t even imagine

Co-worker from Mumbai (yeah, here-say, I know) mentioned temperature up to 50C in the summer.

Mumbai is horrific because of the humidity on top of the high temperature. I’ve been there a couple of times, though never during a heat wave. I would not want to live there.

Argentina gets easily 30+ in the summer, 40+ is not unusual

Depends where you were in BC.

Victoria was >15 degrees colder than Kamloops for instance.

Some of it is acclimation. You do learn to tolerate the heat better. I am always drenched in sweat the first really hot days of the summer which gets better. But high heat which approaches the wet bulb temperature is just stressful on the body. Subject a person with moderate heart failure or kidney problems to such conditions and they may do badly. In normally very hot climates, the health burden of that is spread out over time, year after year, not bunched up all at once.

> But high heat which approaches the wet bulb temperature is just stressful on the body.

Note that "wet-bulb temperature" (WBT) is not a specific value for temperature, it is a way of measuring temperature. You can cave a WBT of 0C, or a WBT of 35C. WBT is the temperature shown by a thermometer covered in a wet cloth over which air is passing.

This is relevant because it indicates the temperature that human skin can reach with any amount of sweat and wind. It is normally much lower than air temperature because of evaporative cooling effects; but, as humidity increases, WBT and air temperature get closer and closer; at 100% humidity, there is no more evaporation, so WBT becomes equal to air temperature.

The problems for human activity start at a WBT of 32C (90F), and a WBT of 35C (95F) means that even healthy humans with access to unlimited water will die of heat stroke in the shade after a few hours.

Thank you for the explanation, I learnt something.

> The problems for human activity start at a WBT of 32C (90F), and a WBT of 35C (95F) means that even healthy humans with access to unlimited water will die of heat stroke in the shade after a few hours.

It’s incredible to think how “fragile” we can be. 35C is not cold or cool but it’s not extreme either. When you think about it, if your core temp drops to 35C you have (severe?) hypothermia. But if your skin can’t get cooler than that you die of heatstroke. Crazy to think about. Even crazier that we terraformed our planet to make this a reality in many more places than we started with.

I've been in a room with a wet bulb temp of 115 F. You walk in, water condenses on you and your clothes.

The max time you can be in that environment is one to two hours.

You have 50°C in South America?

Climate change isn't coming. It's already here.

That is like saying after a major earthquake... oh, fracking caused it. There is absolutely no way to say that climate change is responsible for this or the heat "dome" or whatever they called it here in the PNW. If you look at the averages, you can see that there are annual fluctuations. There are many factors to consider, not just that global warming is responsible for everything.

Agree. This is the third or fourth front page HN discussion about the recent couple days of heat in the Pacific Northwest, and all the discussions have been full of hot takes about climate change that unscientifically try to establish a cause without any statistical analysis or evidence.

Cliff Mass, Professor of Atmospheric Science and chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium mentioned in his recent blog posts that the heat wave was a perfect storm of factors like compression from sinking air coming off the West slopes of the Cascades. He also specifically noted (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):

> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.

You cannot say what is responsible (if that’s possible at all) but you can say whether climate changes makes events more (or less) probable than they used to be. Such statements are usually based on simulations (ensembles) where the number of occurrences of particular events is counted. An example that‘s easy to understand is probability of precipitation from the weather forecast: if it says that the probability of rain is 72% at a particular place, then it means that rain was observed in 72% of the simulations (which are run with slightly different parameters to account for uncertainty in starting conditions). This is a simplified description but maybe it helps?

Climate change has always been coming and here. That’s what it is, changing. No one actually argues this.

I think you mean man made crisis. But, was it man made crisis in 1937 when the previous record was set? Why was that just cyclic or random weather event but this has to be a smoking gun?

It not effective to ”weather isn’t climate… unless it’s used to argue climate change”. That isn’t helpful. Holding up a snowball or pointing at rain is just a shallow reinforcement to people that don’t really understand the topic and that goes both ways.

Instead maybe be helpful and put together the temperature trend for that city over 100 years if you want to get people on board the idea that it’s rapid warming. Or discuss non-political solutions. Or try to not bandwagon finger wag for what should be a level-headed discussion.

While you are right in principle, right now Lytton is not just experiencing record temperatures, it's experiencing temperatures 5 C higher than anything encountered in the last 100-150 years (highest peak known before was 44.4C in 1941, 29 June 2021 was 49.6C):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...

Edit: corrected values to use the previous record for Lytton instead of the previous record for all of Canada.

> It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere

"There are currently 67 fires burning in British Columbia and 44 of those have begun in the last 2 days, according to the B.C. Wildfire Dashboard. To date, the province has experienced 450 fires this year"

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/americas/canada-town-evac...

Looks pretty much like arsonism to me. Is a possibility that they shouldn't discard still.

Intentional or not, to have a wildfire must be a spark source somewhere. 450 sparks in this case. Discarded bottles acting as lenses, gas spilled from a car crash, cigarettes... something.

The most common cause is thunderstorms.

Sometimes yes, you are right, but this depend on the area.

I remember a study from the north of Spain concluding that only around 11% of the wildfires with known cause were by lightning. Most people would guess a much higher percentage if asked. In 2020, some places here experienced a 94% less wildfires than in previous years also. The only variable changing was humans. Everybody at home by covid19 = no wildfires.

To fellow Canadians with better direct experience here, are this hot waves being coupled with heavy (or dry) storms?

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