‘These Are Fires That Are Beyond Resources’

Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze

Jesse Winter

HarperCollins (2026)

Jesse Winter is a reporter and photojournalist who loves being out in the field, experiencing news events at maximum intensity. (I once heard him answer the question “What have you been up to?” with “Oh, you know, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.”)

He’s been writing about and photographing B.C. wildfires since 2018, at one point taking the initial wildfire training so he could get closer to both fires and the BC Wildfire Service workers who fight them.

It was both a good and a terrible time to develop an expertise on wildfire reporting. Western Canadians have always lived with forest fires, but over the past decade fires have become more frequent, more intense giants that create their own weather and overwhelm understanding. Fort McMurray in 2016 marked a turning point in driving home to Canadians that we are living in a new reality — a desperate scramble to evacuate through flames, a part of your town burned down.

After Fort McMurray, there was the destruction of Lytton in 2023, then the conflagration of Jasper in 2024. And in 2023, two B.C. wildfire fighters died in incidents just weeks apart.

In his new book Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze , Winter has captured his own experience covering wildfires and the perspectives of the red-shirted corps who work these fires. It’s journalistic work that takes time and care, because the cone of silence and secrecy that pervades most Canadian public agencies is very much in place when it comes to wildfire fighters.

Along with a stark warning about labour conditions and the tiny size of Canadian wildfire resources compared with those of other countries, Winter’s book includes incredibly dramatic scenes of some of the most controversial wildfire responses in the past three years, including the Adams Lake wildfire in B.C.’s Shuswap region in 2023, the evacuation of Yellowknife in 2023 and the Jasper fire in 2024.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Your book has a really strong focus on labour issues inside BC Wildlife Service and other wildfire services as well across Canada. Why was that important to explore?

Jesse Winter: When I was able to access these spaces, when you spend all day with a crew, they talk. I wasn’t doing formal interviews but just getting to know them and understand their frustrations and the realities of their workplace.

I started to hear over and over concerns about high levels of turnover, high levels of burnout. There's this sort of downward pressure that crew leaders and crew supervisors are juggling — it’s harder for them to do their job if they are in charge of a crew that’s 30 or 40 per cent rookies.

What I started to see, particularly in 2023, was the ways in which all of this sort of downward pressure on crews was making things unsafe.

Firefighters often talk about safety as sort of a Swiss cheese model. Like someone’s inexperience could be a hole in the system, broken equipment could be a hole in the system, but as long as those holes never line up, as long as the safety layers are thick enough, then crews are protected.

In his new book, photojournalist Jesse Winter has captured his own experience covering wildfires and the perspectives of the people who fight these fires.

Winter photo by Ainslie Cruickshank. Book cover by Taehoon Kim.

What's been happening more and more is that things like turnover and burnout, and bigger, longer fire seasons, all of those things are starting to create a scenario where it’s more likely that these holes will start to align, and when that happens, things like firefighters getting killed by falling trees, car crashes, ATV rollovers — these are the outcomes of the system struggling to operate in an environment that it wasn't designed for.

We saw the deaths of 19-year-old Devyn Gale and 25-year-old Zak Muise in 2023, which was shocking to me because we have heard of firefighters dying in other places, but it's really unusual for B.C. Was that a wake-up call, that it is really that dangerous?

For me it was a huge wake-up call. For firefighters? I don't think so.

There were a lot of people saying inside the system that they expected this, but people have been feeling for years that if things didn’t change, someone was going to die.

There are firefighters now, I know, who are choosing to leave the service because they don't want to be around when an entire crew gets burned over.

If you look at some of the safety changes that have been made in places like Australia or California, particularly in California and the U.S., a lot of systemic change happens after a mass casualty event, like the Granite Mountain Hotshots , for example. An entire hotshot crew got wiped out, and a lot of the changes that were brought in after that were things that happened as a result of those kinds of fatalities.

There are definitely folks in the fire service here who are af…