The wildfire season is 78 days longer than it was five decades ago
is half a mile away, with nothing between it and Tim Hatfield’s fireline except flammable spruce trees. High in the Alaskan Arctic, smoke fills the southern horizon—stirred by a light southwesterly breeze that is a source of irritation to the 35-year-old chief firefighter. He is anxious to complete the five-mile defensive buffer he and his 66 firefighters are carving into the boreal forest to stop fire, which has consumed 11,000 acres since it was started by a lightning strike three weeks ago.
Nowhere is the fiery new normal more obvious than in Alaska, which is largely forested and warming at twice the global rate. Of the 10m acres of American forest incinerated in 2015, a new annual record, over half were in the northernmost state. And while the fire season in the Lower 48 has got off to a relatively slow start this year, Alaska is again ablaze. It has lost over 2m acres of forest so far.
The diversity of his team in fact reflects the efficiency of America’s emergency response system. Within hours of the National Interagency Fire Centre in Boise, Idaho, receiving a call for help, it can dispatch one or more of the 110 Hotshot crews employed by federal agencies and state and county governments.
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