The 2016 Ft. McMurray Wildfire: Déjà vu or re-thinking the scope wildland and urban-wildland interface fires on water supplies?
Abstract
A growing number of large severe wildfires have impacted drinking water supplies of both small and larger municipalities in western North America over the past 20 years. While some of these fires include components of wildland-urban interface fire impacts to water or water treatment infrastructure, the vast majority have been wildland fires in critical source water supply regions serving these municipalities. A large body of research has provided key insights on magnitude, variability, and longevity of post-wildfire impacts on erosion, sediment production, and water quality, however assessing the impact of wildfires on water supplies often requires measuring or predicting the downstream propagation of upstream wildfire impacts to water supplies and this remains a comparatively less well explored area of wildfire-water research. The 2016 Horse River wildfire during May-June burned 590,000 ha. forcing the evacuation of the entire City of McMurray ( 90,000 residents) and represents the most expensive natural disaster in Canadian history ($3.6 billion in insurable losses alone). While the wildfire impacted extensive source water supply regions in the area surrounding Ft. McMurray, this fire serves to illustrate a broader range of challenging wildfire-water science and engineering research issues that are needed to assess the impacts of this and potentially other large wildfires on water supplies. Unlike wildfires in headwaters regions, these include unique challenges in assessing impacts of burned tributaries adjacent sources from a large wildfire situated immediately surrounding a very large river system (Athabasca River), post-fire contaminant dilution, mixing, and transport, and contaminant runoff from severely burned residential and commercial/industrial regions of the city on downstream water supplies among others.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AGUFM.B23A0568S
- Keywords:
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- 0432 Contaminant and organic biogeochemistry;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0461 Metals;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0470 Nutrients and nutrient cycling;
- BIOGEOSCIENCESDE: 0496 Water quality;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES