标签： North America

Amid one of the most active wildfire seasons in Canada’s modern history, a growing divide has emerged over how to protect remote, fire-prone communities — as longer, more intense blazes driven by climate change stretch national firefighting resources dangerously thin. As of August 2026, more than 750 active wildfires are burning across the country, following 2023’s record-breaking season that destroyed an expanse of boreal forest roughly equivalent to the entire nation of Syria. The smoke from these blazes has drifted as far south as the U.S. Midwest, choking urban airspace and even drawing a hostile tariff threat from former U.S. President Donald Trump, who attacked Canada for allowing “filthy, polluted” air to cross the border.

For Hubert Wigwas, a 58-year-old councillor with Gull Bay First Nation in northern Ontario, the choice to stay when a wildfire approached his community in mid-2026 was not an act of defiance for defiance’s sake — it was a decision to protect the life he spent decades building. As regional officials ordered all residents to evacuate and deployed firefighting resources to higher-priority populated areas, Wigwas stayed behind. He installed sprinklers on his roof to douse falling embers, checked on isolated elders who also refused to leave, and fueled four docked boats to have a quick escape route ready if the blaze advanced. Now, he faces a C$800 fine for violating the evacuation order, a penalty he plans to fight in court. “This is everything I’ve built in my 58 years,” Wigwas told reporters. “I’m just not going to run away and let it burn.”

Wigwas’s experience laid bare a gaping flaw in Canada’s national wildfire response strategy, he argued: remote First Nations communities, which sit adjacent to vast swathes of flammable boreal forest, are often left waiting for outside support that never arrives in time. That realization has pushed him to call for a new model: self-organized, community-led wildfire response teams trained to protect homes and elders before provincial crews can reach remote areas. “Everybody talks about climate change, but nobody is doing something to unite the (First Nations) reserves and have a system like that set up,” he said.

Provincial officials say their resource allocation follows strict protocols based on fire activity, weather conditions and risk to populated areas, and that they maintain constant communication with First Nations leadership. But thousands of kilometers away in northeast British Columbia, long Canada’s wildfire response front line, that community-led model Wigwas envisions is already a reality.

Over the past three years, wildfire researcher Sonja Leverkus has trained more than 400 local residents — most of them Indigenous — through her volunteer group, the Northeast BC Rural Incident Management Team. Leverkus launched the initiative after concluding that Canada’s traditional response system cannot keep up with the growing frequency and intensity of blazes driven by climate change. “There are not enough human beings in Canada, with the appropriate training, to fight the fires that we have currently, especially over the last five years,” she explained.

Remote communities in British Columbia are often deprioritized for provincial firefighting crews when major blazes threaten heavily populated areas, Leverkus noted, with the nearest backup support sometimes hundreds of kilometers away. Her team has addressed this gap by carrying out controlled prescribed burns to reduce excess fuel that can turn small blazes into catastrophic infernos, and has even purchased its own fire wagons through community fundraising and grants to extinguish small fires before they spread, often arriving ahead of provincial crews. During the 2024 Fort Nelson wildfire, Leverkus and 40 team members stayed behind and were contracted by the provincial government to clear flammable vegetation and support large-scale fire suppression efforts. She has also organized structural protection training to teach locals how to shield buildings from flying embers, the leading cause of home destruction during wildfire events.

Leverkus’s model has drawn support from local residents like 70-year-old former helicopter pilot Cam Allen, who took her training course to learn ground-based fire suppression after seeing the viral story of John Carr, a California man who saved his home from the 2025 Palisades Fire by defending it with a garden hose after most residents evacuated. “It makes you wonder, if 100 people had stayed or 1,000 people had stayed behind and actually did what he did, how much more could have been saved?” Allen asked.

But the push for community-led wildfire defense has sparked fierce debate among emergency management experts and government officials, who warn that allowing residents to defy evacuation orders puts both civilians and first responders at unnecessary risk. Last month, British Columbia wildfire crews were forced to stage a dangerous rescue operation after a man who refused to evacuate became trapped by flames surrounding his home in Clinton. British Columbia Emergency Management Minister Kelly Greene reiterated this month that all residents under evacuation orders must leave, noting that evacuation orders are only issued as a last resort to protect public safety, and that emergency teams may not be able to reach residents who stay behind if conditions worsen.

Paul Kovacs, director of the Catastrophic Loss Institute at the University of Western Ontario, explained that Canada’s low wildfire fatality rate is directly tied to its strict evacuation-first policy, a stance that contrasts with approaches in other fire-prone nations like Australia that allow for “stay and defend” strategies. “In the hierarchy of what is it that you do to manage a wildfire, preservation of life is first,” Kovacs said. While he agreed that local communities can play a critical role in fireproofing homes and structures ahead of fire season, he argued that that work should never take place while an active blaze is approaching.

Provincial officials note that British Columbia has expanded its full-time wildfire staff by 56% in recent years to match growing fire risk, and that self-organized rural groups can be temporarily contracted during major blazes when no provincial crews are available. But Leverkus’s group still lacks official government recognition, leaving trained volunteers at risk of penalties for staying behind to defend their communities. Leverkus is currently working to change that, emphasizing that her training program prioritizes safety above all else: all trainees learn to map multiple escape routes, read fire behavior, and follow orders from trained commanders who will order an evacuation if conditions become too dangerous. Not all trainees choose to stay and defend during active blazes, she added — only those who understand the risks are selected to remain.

“If people want to stay and defend, they need to understand what that means for themselves, what that means for their family,” Leverkus said. Her long-term goal is to turn her program into a national blueprint that can be adopted by remote and rural communities across Canada, creating a network of trained local teams that can fill gaps left by strained provincial response resources. For Wigwas, the fight is just beginning: as he prepares to contest his C$800 fine in court, he says he has no regrets about his choice to stay and protect his community.

A crippling drought, worsened by decades of crumbling infrastructure, has pushed the U.S. Caribbean territory of Puerto Rico into a widespread water crisis, forcing authorities to implement strict rolling water cutoffs that have left hundreds of thousands of residents without consistent access to running water.

Under the emergency rationing plan, most affected households have been divided into two rotating groups, with each group facing full 48-hour suspensions of their piped water supply. As of this week, 180,000 properties across seven regions that rely on the critically depleted Carraízo Reservoir are covered by the measure, and officials have not yet announced when the restrictions will be lifted. When San Juan’s taps went dark for its scheduled 48-hour shutdown Friday, residents across the capital immediately decried the disruptive policy.

Data from the U.S. Drought Monitor confirms that 68% of Puerto Rico is currently experiencing drought conditions, ranging from moderate to extreme. July 2026 ranks as the driest July ever recorded on the island, draining Carraízo—one of Puerto Rico’s most important water storage hubs—to critically low levels that are clearly visible in recent drone footage, which shows large swathes of the reservoir’s normally submerged bed now exposed to the air. Governor Jenniffer González has framed the crisis as primarily weather-driven, noting that the rationing decision came after a joint review of current reservoir levels and long-range weather forecasts. “This situation is beyond our control,” González stated in an official press release. “It is the result of the weather conditions we have been facing, which experts had warned about weeks ago.” She added that rain may return to the island once a lingering blanket of Saharan dust that has stalled storm systems moves out of the Caribbean region, and confirmed that more than 1,000 wildfires are currently burning across the territory as dry conditions persist.

Yet long-standing systemic failures have drastically amplified the impact of the dry spell. According to Puerto Rico’s own water authority, roughly 65% of all treated water produced on the island is lost before reaching customers, largely through unpatched leaks in a network of aged, corroded pipes that have not received full systematic upgrades for decades. Additional contributing factors cited by water management experts include excessive sediment buildup that has reduced the total storage capacity of the island’s key reservoirs.

As the rationing took effect, hundreds of residents across affected areas lined up at government water distribution trucks to fill large containers for drinking, cooking, and hygiene. Many have voiced frustration and confusion over inconsistent implementation of the rotating schedule and unclear communication about which areas will be affected when. For example, residents in Morcelo, a community south of San Juan, were promised running water for a 48-hour window starting Friday, but reported no water service even after the first 24 hours of the scheduled access period had passed. “People are uncertain because they know we’re in the 48-hour window where we’re supposed to have drinking water,” local community leader Rubén Torres told Puerto Rico’s *El Nuevo Dia* Saturday. “What’s happening? The first 24 hours have already passed and the water hasn’t arrived.” San Juan resident Gloriany Baba summed up the widespread frustration in comments to CBS News, calling the conditions “brutal” and adding “It’s unbelievable to live through this today.”

This is not the first time Puerto Rico has been forced to implement large-scale water rationing to combat drought: similar harsh measures were deployed in 2015 and 2020, when some 400,000 households only received running water once every three days. Climate scientists note that extreme weather events like this record-breaking drought are growing more frequent and more intense across the Caribbean as a result of human-caused climate change. The island already has a well-documented history of climate-linked extreme weather disasters, most notably Hurricane Maria in 2017, which devastated Puerto Rico’s already fragile electricity grid, killed thousands of residents, and brought extreme rainfall that scientists confirmed was made far more likely by human-induced climate change.

Governor González stated that the U.S. federal government is providing assistance to address the crisis, though she offered no additional details on the scope or type of support. BBC News has reached out to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for further comment on the federal response.

A ferocious out-of-control wildfire is tearing through remote regions of western Canada’s British Columbia, triggering mandatory evacuation orders for more than 20,000 residents and leaving a trail of uncertainty across the fire-prone Okanagan region.

The Bald Range fire, first detected just three days ago, has doubled in size since its initial discovery, now sprawling across more than 95 square kilometers of land spanning the Summerland and Okanagan-Similkameen districts, per official data from the BC Wildfire Service. As of Saturday morning, crews had not gained any containment over the blaze, which emergency officials describe as an unprecedentedly fast-moving event even for a region long accustomed to seasonal wildfire activity.

Erick Thompson, an emergency management official with the Regional District of Okanagan-Similkameen, called the blaze one of the most explosive he has witnessed in his career. “This is one of the quickest-moving, largest fires in such a short time” the region has seen, he noted, in a testament to the fire’s extraordinary pace of spread. The speed of the blaze even forced Thompson himself to evacuate his own family from the danger zone Saturday morning, after he had spent the previous evening updating the public on the fire’s progression from the regional emergency operations center. In a video recorded from his vehicle as he fled south, Thompson confirmed he had left the operations hub to relocate his family to safety.

Authorities issued mandatory evacuation orders for the entire population of Summerland, a community of roughly 12,000 people, as well as approximately 8,000 additional residents in the neighboring town of Peachland. By early Saturday, Summerland had already been completely cut off from electrical service as the fire advanced on critical infrastructure, city officials confirmed. As of the latest update, officials have not released a full assessment of structural damage, leaving thousands of evacuated residents uncertain about the fate of their homes and properties.

The crisis has also extended to the region’s large equine population, with many residents unable to arrange transportation to evacuate their horses amid the chaotic, fast-moving evacuation order. Local residents told Canadian public broadcaster CBC that owners who could not rescue their animals have opened pasture gates, in the hope that horses will be able to flee the blaze on their own to reach safer ground. Many owners have also painted identifying marks on their horses to make it easier to reunite with the animals after the fire passes, CBC reported. Eyewitnesses on the ground have described the scene as chaotic, with the large blaze advancing much faster than initial projections had predicted.