Waiting, watching and worrying: Emotions run high as wildfire season begins in earnest

This story is part of the World on Fire series, CBC's wildfire and climate change podcast. In this episode, we check in on how front-line workers are feeling as this wildfire season begins in earnest and look at related struggles of ecological grief and the spread of misinformation.

Sonja Leverkus says she no longer looks forward to summer. 

"Last year was probably hands down one of the worst years of my life." 

But this year is shaping up to be more of the same for the wildland fire crew leader and ignition specialist.

Leverkus and her crew are based in Fort Nelson, B.C., which is currently at the centre of several big, fast-moving wildfires. This season, they had to switch gears from putting out zombie fires that burned through the winter to help battle the massive Parker Lake wildfire that was spotted on May 10. 

That wildfire, which started when high winds blew a tree onto a power line and caused it to catch fire, forced an evacuation order for about 4,700 people, including the community as well as Fort Nelson First Nation in B.C.'s northeast.

"We are out there in the black, and also I live here," says Leverkus, an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta Wildfire Analytics Lab. "That changes things a lot."

"We know we're going to see more fire. It just seems to be what's happening and what we all feel when we listen to the land up here."

Federal scientists and politicians weighed in with their predictions last week for another hot, dry summer — the "perfect conditions for intense wildfires," said Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.

Canada's 2023 wildfire season saw eight people die fighting fires, tens of thousands forced to flee their homes and communities, a thick blanket of smoke across the continent, and a record 15 million hectares scorched.

"That's seven times the annual average," says Mike Flannigan, the B.C. innovation research chair in predictive services, emergency management and fire science at Thompson Rivers University. 

For comparison's sake, Flannigan says the area burned in 2023 was bigger than the total of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and several Prince Edward Islands combined. It destroyed about five per cent of the forested area of Canada.

"Last year was a crazy year, an exceptional year, a year off the charts," he says. 

While Flannigan doesn't think we'll come close to that again, "it will depend on the day-to-day fire weather.