July 18, 2026
The smoke came into the Upper Peninsula Wednesday night and was over West Michigan by Thursday morning. Air quality index over 500 in spots. Grand Rapids skyline gone.
Anybody who’s been in this business more than a few years has fielded the same question this week from a neighbor, a spouse, a guy at the counter: why don’t they just clean up their forests?
It’s a fair question. It’s asked in good faith by people who’ve heard “forest management” repeated enough times that it sounds like a solution somebody’s refusing to implement. And most of us in the fire service don’t have a ready answer, because boreal fire is not what most American firefighters train on or ever see.
So let’s go through it. What’s burning, why it behaves the way it does, why the fuels treatment that works at home doesn’t scale to that country, and how the mutual aid system actually moves resources when it does.
No politics in this one. Just the fire.
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WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT
There are roughly 900 active wildfires in Canada right now. The majority are burning out of control in the boreal forest.
Canada is at National Preparedness Level 4 — significant activity in multiple jurisdictions, high demand for mobilization of crews and equipment from other jurisdictions. Second highest on their five-point scale.
We’re at PL4 too. NICC bumped the U.S. to three on June 18 and four on June 29. As of this week, NIFC has 68 large fires going, with 17,482 personnel committed — 140 crews, 1,024 engines, 140 helicopters.
Both countries at PL4 at the same time. Anybody who’s ordered resources at a national preparedness level of four knows what that means: the well is not deep, national priorities are governing, and everybody is waiting behind somebody else.
That’s the operating environment this is all happening inside. Worth holding onto.
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THE FUEL
Boreal forest is black spruce and jack pine sitting on top of peat.
Take those one at a time, because both matter and they matter differently.
Black spruce is about the most efficient crown fire carrier in North America. The live crown base is low — branches to the ground, or near enough. Dead branches persist on the lower bole and stay there, cured, held up in the air like kindling on a rack. The stands are dense. The canopy is continuous. Add resinous foliage with low moisture of extinction, and you have a fuel type engineered by nature to take a surface fire and put it in the crowns fast.
The Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System has a fuel type for it — C-2, boreal spruce — with an assigned crown fuel load. It’s a known quantity. Everybody who works that country knows what C-2 does under a bad ERC and an aligned wind.
What it does is run. Crown fire in continuous black spruce doesn’t creep. Once it’s in the canopy with wind behind it, you are not putting people in front of it, and you’re not going to. You anchor, you flank if you can, you find a road or a lake or a change in fuel, and you back up to it. Direct attack on the head of a running crown fire in C-2 is how you get a fatality report with your name on the cover.
Now the peat.
Underneath that spruce, in a lot of that country, is organic soil — accumulated partially decomposed plant material, sometimes shallow, sometimes meters deep, built up over centuries or millennia. It holds water like a sponge. Until it doesn’t.
When peat dries down, it will sustain smoldering combustion. Not flaming — smoldering. Oxygen-limited, low-temperature, self-sustaining, and it moves through the ground with no visible flame at all. You can walk a black line that looks dead cold and have fire two feet under your boots.
That’s your holdover. And in the boreal it does something that will get your attention if you’ve only worked timber and grass in the lower 48.
It overwinters.
Peat fires go underground in the fall, smolder through the entire winter insulated under snow, and surface again in spring when the ground dries and the wind comes up. The literature calls them overwintering fires. Crews on the ground call them zombie fires. In Alaska and the Northwest Territories, research published in Nature found overwintering fires have contributed up to one-third of burned area in individual years.
Think about what that means for suppression accounting. You can put a fire out — genuinely out, by every standard we’d apply here — and have it come back in April in the same footprint. The fire season doesn’t end. It goes dormant.
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WHY THE FIX DOESN’T SCALE
Here’s where I want to be careful, because I’m not about to tell you fuels work doesn’t matter. It does. I’ll defend thinning and prescribed fire in front of any audience.
Fuels treatment works. It works where you can get to it, on the ground where it makes sense, at a cost somebody can actually pay. Around communities. Along the wildland-urban interface. In accessible timber where you can put a crew and a chipper and a burn boss on the ground and treat acres and come back and maintain them on a rotation.
That is real; it saves structures, and every one of us should be pushing for more of it in our own districts.
But three things break when you try to apply it across the boreal.
First: access. That country is roadless at a scale that’s hard to communicate to somebody who hasn’t flown it. Your way in is a float plane or a helicopter. Your nearest engine may be hundreds of miles away and on the wrong side of a lake. You cannot mechanically treat ground you cannot drive equipment onto, and you cannot maintain a treatment you cannot get back to.
Second: scale. The Canadian boreal is roughly a quarter of the world’s remaining intact forest. Run the arithmetic on per-acre mechanical treatment cost across a landmass that size. There isn’t a budget on earth. Not Canada’s, not ours. It isn’t a question of will.
Third — and this one is the part people don’t know: in black spruce, the treatment may not do what you want anyway.
There’s an experimental crown fire study out of Alberta that tested exactly this. Researchers thinned crowns in a boreal black spruce stand and then burned it under measured conditions. The finding, and it’s in the title of the paper: recent crown thinning did not reduce spread rate, and did not reduce total fuel consumption.
Read that again if you work fuels. They did the treatment. They burned it. It ran anyway, and it consumed the same fuel.
That’s not an argument against fuels work generally. It’s a specific finding in a specific fuel type, and the reason is that the fire in that fuel type isn’t only in the crowns — it’s in the ground layer, the moss, the duff, the peat, and thinning the overstory doesn’t touch that. Some work suggests thinning can even help the surface fuels dry.
Mulching treatments in black spruce peatlands have been studied too, in the context of protecting the interface. Those have their place. But the honest summary is this: boreal peatland fire is a hard problem that the people who study it professionally describe as a major challenge for regional wildfire management. It is not a problem anybody is refusing to solve out of laziness.
So when somebody at the counter asks why they don’t just clean up the forest, the true answer is: you can clean up the parts near people, and they do, and it helps. The rest of it burns. It has burned on a cycle since the ice went out. Fire is how that ecosystem regenerates — black spruce cones are semi-serotinous; they need the heat.
What’s changed isn’t diligence. It’s that seasons start earlier, run hotter, and end later, and deep burning into organic soils has gotten more frequent. Canada’s last three seasons have been among the worst in its recorded history. 2023 was the worst on record; 2025 was second.
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ARSON, IGNITION, AND A DISTINCTION WORTH MAKING
Arson comes up constantly in the public conversation about these fires, so let’s handle it with the precision an investigator would.
Human-caused ignition is real, and it’s a significant share of starts on both sides of the border. Nobody serious disputes that. We deal with it here — every one of us has worked a fire that started because somebody did something stupid or deliberate.
But ignition source and fire behavior are two different questions.
You know this from structure work. The cause of the fire and the reason the fire got big are not the same finding. A cigarette and a lightning strike start identical fires when the fuel is cured, the RH has bottomed out, and the winds are aligned. What determines whether a start stays a quarter acre or becomes one of 900 out-of-control fires is not who lit it. It’s what it lands in.
Chasing ignition source as the explanation for a catastrophic season is like writing a fire investigation report that identifies the source of ignition and stops — no fuel load, no ventilation, no fire spread analysis. It’s half a report. Any of us would send it back.
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HOW THE HELP ACTUALLY MOVES
This is the part I most want fire service people to know, because it’s ours and most folks outside the wildland world have never heard of it.
Since 1982, the United States and Canada have run a formal reciprocal arrangement between the National Interagency Coordination Center at NIFC in Boise and the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre in Winnipeg. It’s codified in an operating plan, backed by federal law, and separate from the border compacts our northern states run with adjacent provinces.
Mechanically, it’s dispatch. Requests from Canada come to CIFFC to NICC. Requests from us go NICC to CIFFC. There’s an international liaison position, a daily flat rate structure covering salary, benefits, overtime, and hazard pay, and defined terms for travel and per diem and vehicle hire. It is a real resource order system, not a handshake.
It runs both directions, and it runs heavy.
Going north: in 2023, Canada’s worst season on record, the U.S. sent more than 2,000 wildland firefighters and support personnel. Hand crews, hotshot crews, incident management teams, smokejumpers, fireline supervisors, Mark III pumps, fold-a-tanks, handheld radios. In June 2025, NICC mobilized 214 resources to Manitoba, Saskatchewan, B.C., and Alberta, including airtankers and complex incident management teams.
Coming south: in January 2025, when Southern California was burning, Alberta sent 40 Type 1 wildland firefighters and support staff, with more Type 1 crews, incident command personnel, water bombers, and night-vision-capable helicopters staged. British Columbia sent senior technical staff to fill specialized ICS functions for CAL FIRE, plus a Type 1 crew. Quebec deployed CL-415 water bombers — on top of two it had already sent to Los Angeles the previous August — with 60 Type 1 firefighters on standby. In 2020, Natural Resources Canada reports 594 Canadian firefighters and specialists deployed to the United States. NIFC pulled two Quebec hand crews for California that September.
Canadian crews have worked American fires on American ground under American incident commanders. Some have gone home hurt. In 2023, Canada lost wildland firefighters, and NMAC put out a statement that I’d ask you to sit with for a second: their losses are felt by everyone, regardless of country.
That’s not diplomacy. That’s the fire service.
And the principle is the exact same one every one of us runs on. When Stronach Township gets a working structure fire, I don’t have enough people. Nobody does. I get on the radio, and Filer comes, and Manistee Township comes. When they’ve got one, we go. Nobody keeps a tally sheet. Nobody writes a letter afterward complaining that somebody else’s fire was inconvenient.
Scale it up to two national coordination centers and 44 years, and that’s NICC and CIFFC. Same handshake, more paperwork.
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WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US AT HOME
A few practical things, because that’s what this newsletter is for.
Smoke is an occupational exposure, and we are bad at treating it like one. Wildfire smoke is mostly PM2.5 — particulate under 2.5 microns, small enough to get past the upper airway into the deep lung and cross into the bloodstream. On a bad smoke day, your crew standing around outside the station is taking an exposure. Cloth and surgical masks do nothing for it. N95 filters it, correctly worn and sealed. If you’ve got personnel with asthma or cardiac history, this is a real conversation, not a soft one.
Your public is asking you. Fire departments are the most trusted institution most people deal with, and on smoke days the phone rings at the station, not the health department. Be ready with something better than a shrug: check AQI before outdoor exertion, keep windows closed and run recirculate, a box fan with a MERV-13 filter cleans one room cheaply, and take it seriously for anybody with respiratory or cardiac conditions, and for the very young and very old.
Holdover is a lesson that travels. Most of us don’t have peat. Plenty of us have duff, punky stumps, sawdust piles, mulch beds, and old organic fill, and every one of those will hold fire longer than you think. If boreal peat can smolder under snow for six months, the mulch bed against a foundation can absolutely go overnight. Overhaul accordingly, and take the thermal imager seriously on wildland-urban interface work.
And the mutual aid point is worth saying out loud to your people. The system that sends a hotshot crew from Idaho to Manitoba is philosophically identical to the one that sends your tender to the next township. It only works because nobody treats the request as an imposition. That’s worth protecting, at every level it exists.
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The smoke over Manistee County tonight came out of fuel that’s been burning on this continent since before anybody drew a border across it, in a forest type that regenerates by burning, under conditions that are getting worse.
We can protect people from the smoke. We can harden the interface. We can fund the crews and fill the vacancies and get the treated acres up where they belong.
What we can’t do is rake the boreal forest. Nobody can. And any solution that starts there is going to disappoint the people who believe in it.
The people up north working those 900 fires are doing the same job we do, in worse country, with the same shortage of hands. Some of them have stood on our fires. If the wind shifts and the smoke goes the other way next month, we’ll be in their inbox.
That’s the deal. It’s a good one. Let’s not talk ourselves out of it.
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Author’s note: Every claim is sourced. Corrections with sources welcome and will be published.
Fred R. LaPoint is Fire Chief of Stronach Township Fire Department in Manistee County, Michigan, a licensed paramedic, and a U.S. Coast Guard veteran. He has served on more than three dozen disaster deployments with Team Rubicon.
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SOURCES
Fire conditions and preparedness levels
— Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, national situation reports, July 2026. ciffc.ca
— National Interagency Fire Center, National Fire News, July 17, 2026. nifc.gov
— NIFC National Significant Wildland Fire Potential Outlook, July 1, 2026.
— NOTUS, active fire count and boreal conditions, July 17, 2026.
Fuel type and fire behavior
— Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System, C-2 boreal spruce fuel type.
— “Recent Crown Thinning in a Boreal Black Spruce Forest Does Not Reduce Spread Rate nor Total Fuel Consumption: Results from an Experimental Crown Fire in Alberta, Canada.”
— “The effects of black spruce fuel management on surface fuel condition and peat burn severity in an experimental fire,” Canadian Journal of Forest Research.
— “Assessing Drivers of Cross-Scale Variability in Peat Smoldering Combustion Vulnerability in Forested Boreal Peatlands,” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, 2019.
Overwintering and holdover fire
— “Overwintering fires in boreal forests,” Nature, 2021.
— “Overwintering fires can occur in both peatlands and upland forests with varying ecological impacts,” Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2025.
— “Impact of Snow on Underground Smoldering Wildfire in Arctic-Boreal Peatlands.”
— Ontario Nature, “Zombie Fires Burning in the Peat,” 2024.
Mutual aid
— Canada/United States Reciprocal Forest Fire Fighting Arrangement, Operating Plan 2024. nifc.gov
— NIFC, “International Support.” nifc.gov
— NIFC, “U.S. Firefighters Continue to Support Canada During Record-Breaking Wildfires,” July 19, 2023.
— NIFC, “U.S. Resources Support Canadian Wildfires,” May 19, 2023.
— Public Safety Canada, “Update on Canada’s response to the wildfires in California,” January 14, 2025.
— Natural Resources Canada, 2020 deployment figures.
— Global News, “How Canada helped in past U.S. wildfires,” July 2026.
Behind The Alarm • Fred R. LaPoint • Share freely.
This article first appeared in Behind The Alarm, the newsletter of Fred R. LaPoint, Fire Chief Paramedic of the Stronach Township Fire Department, on July 18, 2026. Read the original.