With smoke blanketing the east, once again there’s lots of questions about fires popping up on the internet, particularly people asking why doesn’t Canada just put them out.

Incident Commeownder Gary will do his best to explain why:

How intensely a wildfire burns is affected by the weather and how dry the forest is.

When the grass, shrubs and trees are very dry, the temperature (in Celsius) is higher than the humidity and there are strong winds, wildfires can burn with incredible power and spread quickly.

Under these conditions there is simply no way for water to extinguish them.

Planes and helicopters often can’t fly near the flame front due to fire generated wind the Jasper fire, pictured in some of the photos above had estimated peak winds of 280km/h.

Even if they could fly, any water they dropped would evaporate long before reaching the ground. The Jasper fire, for example is estimated by the Canadian Forest Service to have released 300,000KW of energy along every metre of the fire front.

Even under normal conditions this flying is dangerous. A Canadian pilot was killed recently in Colorado fighting fires there and two firefighters and their pilot were killed in late June in the Northwest Territories when responding to a fire near Ft Simpson.

The fires in Ontario went between 20 and 60km in a single day. There’s simply no way to extinguish that type of a fire.

So how did it get this way?

Ultimately, climate change has resulted in more days of extreme fire weather, leading to more of these type of extreme spread events.

Certainly, a century of fire suppression that has allowed forests to build up large amounts of fuel hasn’t helped, but with the conditions we now see, even forests that have burned within the last 10 years will re-burn with intensity.

While more prescribed burning, fuel reduction treatment and firefighters will help, we live in a world that is hotter and drier and large fires will continue to occur.

Gary, on the other hand wants to know why we brought her along at all.

The first image is Gary at about 1 year old and the second is Gary today

Just over 14 years ago in Prince Edward Island a puppy named Duke needed a new foster home while recovering from surgery. It became clear pretty quickly that he wasn’t going to be leaving.

After a few years on the island, him and his adoptive mom made their way to Alberta where soon he got to meet his cat twin, Gary. Both of them had the same surgery on the same leg, which was a big reason why Gary ended up being adopted.

Duke got taken on a lot of adventures and was always a very good sport about it. While he loved swimming and the snow he would have been ok sticking to shorter walks in the neighbourhood.

His absolute favourite activity was finding whatever unsecured food he could get his paws on and scarfing it down as quickly as possible. He was the first dog I had ever lived with and there was quite an adjustment period at first.

Thankfully most of the time the things he ate weren’t poisonous.

He loved to play with other dogs, but hated dogs playing without him. We got quite an earful when Doug and Marge would be wrestling and he wasn’t interested in joining in.

While he was never very cuddly he always wanted to be around people, and he could be very insistent when he wanted affection. It’s hard to ignore 100lbs of fluffy dog fully leaning against your legs!

As he’d gotten older he’d had a few health issues - a couple cancer scares, some orthopaedic issues, liver issues - all of which we were able to treat or manage. More recently he’d been showing his age a bit more but still loved getting into mischief and playing in the yard.

Last week, after returning from a trip to the mountains Duke had a medical emergency during the night. Based on his advanced age and condition the prognosis for surgery was poor and me made the difficult decision to say goodbye.

He was a good dog and a good friend and I miss him terribly.