The threat of wildfires is rising. So is new artificial intelligence solutions to fight them

Sun, September 24, 2023

LONDON (AP) — Wildfires fueled by climate change have ravaged communities from Maui to the Mediterranean this summer, killing many people, exhausting firefighters and fueling demand for new solutions. Enter artificial intelligence.

Firefighters and startups are using AI-enabled cameras to scan the horizon for signs of smoke. A German company is building a constellation of satellites to detect fires from space. And Microsoft is using AI models to predict where the next blaze could be sparked.

With wildfires becoming larger and more intense as the world warms, firefighters, utilities and governments are scrambling to get ahead of the flames by tapping into the latest AI technology — which has stirred both fear and excitement for its potential to transform life. While increasingly stretched first responders hope AI offers them a leg up, humans are still needed to check that the tech is accurate.

California's main firefighting agency this summer started testing an AI system that looks for smoke from more than 1,000 mountaintop camera feeds and is now expanding it statewide.

The system is designed to find “abnormalities” and alert emergency command centers, where staffers will confirm whether it’s indeed smoke or something else in the air.

“The beauty of this is that it immediately pops up on the screen and those dispatchers or call takers are able to interrogate that screen” and determine whether to send a crew, said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of intelligence for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The cameras, part of a network that workers previously had to watch, provide billions of bytes of data for the AI system to digest. While humans still need to confirm any smoke sightings, the system helps reduce fatigue among staffers typically monitoring multiple screens and cameras, alerting them to look only when there's possible fire or smoke, SeLegue said.

It's already helped. A battalion chief got a smoke alert in the middle of the night, confirmed it on his cellphone and called a command center in San Diego to scramble first responders to the remote area.

The dispatchers said that if they hadn’t been alerted, the fire would have been much larger because it likely wouldn't have been noticed until the next morning, SeLegue said.

San Francisco startup Pano AI takes a similar approach, mounting cameras on cell towers that scan for smoke and alert customers, including fire departments, utility companies and ski resorts.

The cameras use computer vision machine learning, a type of AI.

“They’re trained very specifically to detect smoke or not, and we train them with images of smoke and images of not smoke,” CEO Sonia Kastner said.

The images are combined with feeds from government weather satellites that scan for hotspots, along with other data sources, such as social media posts.

The technology gets around one of the main problems in the traditional way of detecting wildfires — relying on 911 calls from passers-by that need confirmation from staffers before crews and water-dropping planes can be deployed.

“Generally, only one in 20 of these 911 calls are actually a wildfire. Even during fire season, it might be a cloud or fog or a barbecue,” Kastner said.

Pano AI’s systems do still rely on final confirmation, with managers playing a time lapse of the camera feed to ensure it’s smoke rising.

For fighting forest fires, “technology is becoming really essential,” said Larry Bekkedahl, senior vice president of energy delivery at Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility and a Pano AI customer.

Utility companies sometimes play a role in sparking wildfires, when their power lines are knocked down by wind or struck by falling trees. Hawaii’s electric utility acknowledged that its power lines started a devastating blaze in Maui this summer after apparently being downed by high winds.

PGE, which provides electricity to 51 cities in Oregon, has deployed 26 Pano AI cameras, and Bekkedahl said they have helped speed up response and coordination with emergency services.

Previously, fire departments were “running around looking for stuff and not even really knowing exactly where it’s at,” he said. The cameras help detect fires quicker and get teams on the ground faster, shaving up to two hours off response times.

“That’s significant in terms of how fast that fire can can spread and grow,” Bekkedahl said.

Using AI to detect smoke from fires “is relatively easy,” said Juan Lavista Ferres, chief data scientist at Microsoft.

“What is not easy is to have enough cameras that cover enough places,” he said, pointing to vast, remote areas in northern Canada that have burned this summer.

Ferres' team at Microsoft has been developing AI models to predict where fires are likely to start. They have fed the model with maps of areas that burned previously, along with climate and geospatial data.

The system has its limitations — it can't predict random events like a lightning strike. But it can sift through historical weather and climate data to identify patterns, such as areas that are typically drier. Even a road, which indicates people are nearby, is a risk factor, Ferres said.

“It’s not going to get it all perfectly right," he said. "But what it can do is it can build a probability map (based on) what happened in the past.”

The technology, which Microsoft plans to offer as an open source tool, can help first responders trying to figure out where to focus their limited resources, Ferres said.

Another company is looking to the heavens for a solution. German startup OroraTech analyzes satellite images with artificial intelligence.

Taking advantage of advances in camera, satellite and AI technology, OroraTech has launched two mini satellites about the size of a shoebox into low orbit, about 550 kilometers (340 miles) above Earth’s surface. The Munich-based company has ambitions to send up eight more next year and eventually put 100 into space.

As wildfires swept central Chile this year, OroraTech said it provided thermal images at night when aerial drones are used less frequently.

Weeks after OroraTech launched its second satellite, it detected a fire near the community of Keg River in northern Alberta, where flames burned remote stretches of boreal forest repeatedly this summer.

"There are algorithms on the satellite, very efficient ones to detect fires even faster," CEO Thomas Gruebler said.

The AI also takes into account vegetation and humidity levels to identify flare-ups that could spawn devastating megafires. The technology could help thinly stretched firefighting agencies direct resources to blazes with the potential to cause the most damage.

“Because we know exactly where the fires are, we can see how the fires will propagate," Gruebler said. “So, which fire will be the big fire in one day and which will stop on their own.”

___

AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed.

Kelvin Chan, The Associated Press

This season's widespread, severe wildfires will have long-lasting impact on N.W.T.'s boreal forest

CBC
Sun, September 24, 2023 

Volunteers, including Edmund Gill, up front, clear dry branches to create a firebreak as wildfires threatened the Northwest Territories town of Yellowknife in August. More than four million hectares of N.W.T. forest have burned during the 2023 fire season. 

(Jennifer Gauthier/Reuters - image credit)

Usually fires help to maintain a healthy boreal forest, but it's all about balance.

More than four million hectares of boreal forest have burned in the N.W.T. this wildfire season, and that paired with the severity of the fires will lead to a range of long-term impacts on the landscape.

Jennifer Baltzer is a professor of biology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Baltzer says wildfires are crucial to maintaining biodiversity in the boreal forest, but this is not a typical fire season.

"Wildfire is just a really important and central component of the way the boreal system functions," she said, "But with climate warming and drying and the kinds of conditions we've seen this summer and in previous summers, we're seeing fires that are burning in ways that we haven't seen before."

Jennifer Baltzer is the Canada Research Chair in forests and global change at Wilfrid Laurier University. She says while wildfires are vital to maintaining biodiversity in the boreal forest, the 2023 N.W.T. fire season is not a typical one. This year's fires, she says, will have a range of impacts on the landscape. 

(Angela Gzowski/Wilfrid Laurier University)

What's different about this season's fires?

Area and severity of fires

This wildfire season has been the worst on record in the territory. Not only is the area burned extraordinary, but the season has been exceptionally dry, leading to the fires burning hotter, and deeper into the soil.

According to Baltzer, fires usually occur 70 to 100 years apart from one another in the N.W.T., but these intervals are getting shorter. The combination of more widespread, intense and frequent fires has several consequences to the forests.

Peat is the thick, spongy layer that forms part of the soil in boreal forests, and it's where 80 to 90 per cent of carbon in the boreal forest is stored. This layer builds up over time, storing carbon from the atmosphere as it grows.

Peatlands store carbon and provide valuable habitat for forest species.

 (Taylor Holmes/CBC)

While wildfires will burn the peat soil, they are not usually intense enough to burn through the build up between fires, and there is enough time between burns for the peat layer to recover.

However, Baltzer said that this seems to be changing. She said that in the 2014 fires there were places where all of the carbon that was accumulated during the fire-free period burned, and the fires began burning older carbon, or what is known as legacy carbon.

"This is a really important change in the way the system responds to these more severe wildfires like we saw this summer, because it means that the carbon sequestration mechanisms of the boreal forest are not working the way they have in the past when they're challenged by these really large and extreme wildfires that are really deep-burning into the soils."

In the long term, the burning of legacy carbon in the boreal forests could mean the forests emit carbon dioxide rather than remove it from the atmosphere.

Forest regrowth

The extensive, deep burning can also affect how forests regenerate after the fires. If fires occur too frequently in an area, they can kill seeds stored in the soil. Short fire intervals may also kill trees before they are mature enough to reproduce and leave new seeds.

Black spruce reestablishes well on thick peat soils; pine and aspens do not. Baltzer says that after intense burns, forests dominated by spruce trees may be replaced with aspen and birch forests.

"The forest will stay as forest, but the composition changes, which has implications for the other plants that grow in the forest and for the wildlife that use that forest," she said, "In the most extreme situation, we see burning that is severe enough that we have no regeneration of trees, and in fact, a transition toward either grassland or shrubland systems."

This change may come with some benefits. Deciduous trees like aspen and birch tend to be less flammable than jack pine or black spruce, Baltzer said. A shift from primarily coniferous to primarily aspen forests could provide natural fire breaks on the landscape.

Impacts on wildlife

As the forests change, so do the species that inhabit them.

Samuel Hache is a landbird researcher with the Canadian Wildlife Service. He said that species adapted for mature boreal forests such as chickadees, nuthatches, warblers and Canada jays may struggle as more habitat is lost to wildfires.

"For me, a growing concern is perhaps how much mature forest will be left in the Northwest Territories to be able to support communities of mature forest specialists."

Mature boreal forests take decades to regrow. As large swaths of older forests burn, some species may struggle to find habitat. Baltzer said that caribou are one species that avoid burned areas for years following a fire.

Bobby Drygeese lives in Dettah, N.W.T., and he said he's been seeing more animals out in the open since the fires, and that the animals are more skittish than usual.

Dettah resident Bobby Drygeese says animals are out in the open more than usual this year due to the wildfires burning in N.W.T. However, he's optimistic they'll return to their normal habitats over the next few years.

 (Avery Zingel/CBC)

"We've seen a lot of bears, a lot of foxes and stuff out on the highways and the roads."

However, Hache said there will be both "winners and losers."

After the fires in 2014, Hache and his colleagues discovered that some birds did make use of even the most-severely burned areas.

"In the next few years we expect that the so-called fire specialists, you can think about the black-back woodpecker, common nighthawk, and some other open-habitat species that will benefit for the first maybe two, three, four years," Hache said.

Drygeese is also optimistic about the return of wildlife. He expects animals to return to regrowth near Dettah in the coming years.

"Because of the new sprouts and all that, there'll be nice and fresh and clean food. So animals will be coming back to those burn areas, but it might not be for a couple years."

Fire and water

Wildfires can also affect permafrost thawing. Baltzer said that permafrost thawing is not only associated with the fires directly.

Peat serves as an insulating layer for permafrost, as does tree cover. When fires burn through the canopy and deep into the soil, it removes layers of insulation protecting permafrost. Blackened earth also adds to the problem, as the scorched soil absorbs more energy and accelerates permafrost thaw.

"A lot of those southerly permafrost landscapes are already thawing out just in the face of climate warming. You have that additional input of energy from wildfire, and that can be the extra energy input needed to push those systems to a permafrost-free state," Baltzer said.

There are other impacts on water systems from the wildfires.

Mike Waddington is a professor and Canada research chair in eco-hydrology at McMaster University. He studies the effects of wildfires, and said that there are multiple ways fire affects how water flows through a landscape.

After a wildfire the soil can become water repellant. This can contribute to erosion and also have impacts on water quality, as the runoff carries excess nutrients and carbon which can affect water quality, Waddington said.

"That's a concern that people in N.W.T. will need to be aware of. In many cases after fire, a decrease in the quality of the water increases nutrients, algal growth, dissolved organic carbon, which increases the cost for treatability."

While the immediate damage from the fires is easily visible, it will take years to determine the full effects of this exceptionally-severe wildfire season on the territory.

B.C. mule deer stressed by wildfire, but still much to learn about wildlife impacts

The Canadian Press
Sun, September 24, 2023 


Proof that deer experienced elevated stress in response to wildfires in British Columbia's southern Interior can be found in their poop, although researchers say there's still much to learn about what increasingly severe blazes mean for wildlife.

Shaun Freeman, a wildlife and habitat biologist with the Skeetchestn First Nation, said his team began gathering mule deer pellets in August 2021, while two large fires were still burning in the area between Cache Creek and Kamloops, B.C.

The samples were sent to the Toronto Zoo, where testing revealed elevated concentrations of the stress-induced hormone cortisol.

Stress can affect the animals' nutritional uptake, causing them to burn precious fat stores, and it can decrease their ability to produce offspring, Freeman said.

Cortisol levels have since dropped by around half in samples taken during more favourable conditions, he said, allowing the researchers to establish a baseline.

But the local mule deer population has been declining, and the Sparks Lake and Tremont Creek wildfires that together spanned 1,595 square kilometres scorched half of the animals' key winter habitat in Skeetchestn territory, Freeman said.

The winter range has mature old-growth conifers, which help deer move through the forest by shielding the ground from deep snowfall. The trees' needles and arboreal lichens also provide food during the sparse winter months, he explained.

Swathes of forests burned by the 2021 wildfires have shifted to the kind of habitat that deer would forage in during the summer, he said.

With access restrictions in response to the wildfires lifting this fall, the First Nation has asked people to stay out of the areas burned in 2021, especially at low elevations frequented by deer,in order to minimize stressors and disturbances.

Adam Ford, Canada research chair in wildlife restoration ecology based at the University of B.C.'s Okanagan campus, said there are many unknowns and variables when it comes to understanding the impacts of wildfire on wildlife.

The effects vary over the short and long term and across seasons and species, as well as different types of habitats and how animals use those areas, he said.

Ford said the return of fire to the landscape after decades of aggressive suppression efforts could actually be a "net benefit" for most wildlife.

But for that to happen it has to be the right kind of fire, and it must be combined with land-management approaches that support overall ecosystem health, he said.

"We're going to have fires regardless," Ford said.

"What we want to see is the return of good fire, cultural fire, prescribed fire."

Cultural fire — the strategicblazes Indigenous Peoples used to steward the land before fire suppression ramped up with colonization — would have led to explosions of vegetation for wildlife to feast on, among other benefits, Ford said.

Yet climate change is fuelling increasingly large, severe wildfires, and their effects interact with other disturbances, such as clear-cut logging and reforestation.

As fire returns to the landscape, Ford said it's important to manage those impacts.

If an ecosystem is already "sputtering along, then fire could be bad," he said.

The predominant approach in B.C. is to replant logged or burned areas with coniferous trees intended to feed the forest industry. It's also common practice to remove deciduous treesthat would otherwise play important roles in the ecosystem, including support for wildlife, Ford said.

"The problem is people think restoration is planting trees. You're restoring people's access to timber, but you're not restoring the habitat (or) the ecosystem," he said.

"If we want (wildfire) to be a benefit, then maybe we don't let all these other activities come in after the fire," Ford said. "Maybe we enjoy the flush of deciduous understory and don't see it as competition for softwood lumber species."

Fire can be used to promote regeneration and biodiversity on the landscape, agreed Sarah Dickson-Hoyle, an ecologist working with the Secwepemcul'ecw Restoration and Stewardship Society, of which Skeetchestn First Nation is a member.

"But that contrasts really drastically with these extensive high severity burns."

The onset of "megafire" has prompted calls for scientists to deepen their understanding of the long-term effects and trajectories of recovery, she said.

Secwepemc territories have been affected by several large, high-intensity blazes in recent years, including the 1,900-square-kilometre Elephant Hill fire in 2017.

Work so far has revealed limited short-term recovery in areas that wereseverelyscorched, said Dickson-Hoyle, an intern with the innovation organization Mitacs and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of B.C.'s faculty of forestry.

"We're seeing much lower diversity for those understory plants, for the shrubs, the grasses, the wildflowers that are not only the biggest part of biodiversity in those forests, but are really important for wildlife forage," she said.

"Understanding the impacts of these megafires is also bringing to the forefront that these fires in many of the landscapes in B.C. are not what those areas would have been adapted to. It's outside the historical range," she added.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2023.

Brenna Owen, The Canadian Press

PARENTAL RIGHTS
Ontario soccer refs start wearing body cams to deter parental abuse


CBC
Sun, September 24, 2023 

Angelina Baldino, who's in her fifth year of refereeing, said the cameras make her feel safer. (Igor Petrov/CBC - image credit)

Some referees with Ontario's soccer association started wearing body cameras this week as part of a new pilot project meant to deter parental abuse, which is a main reason officials are quitting the job.

There are 50 body cameras available to the roughly 6,000 referees in the province, according to Ontario Soccer CEO Johnny Misley, who said the effort is the first of its kind in North America. The British Football Association rolled out a similar project earlier this year, which Misley said inspired the Ontario effort.

"We feel there's an opportunity here, that we can show some leadership and try to curb the culture of referee abuse, which is the number one reason why referees leave the game and sport in general," Misley said.

"This is not acceptable. And honestly, seeing these referees with cameras on them today is a pretty sad state of where our society is," he added.

Misley said the pilot project is being conducted in partnership with Brock University, who will handle the research component of the evidence-based trial. The number one objective, he said, is determining wether the cameras act as a physical deterrent for vocal and physical abuse.

On Sunday, refs got to test out the cameras during a match at the Ontario Soccer Centre in Vaughan, Ont. The trial will run through the rest of the outdoor season, which goes through October, Misley said. It will continue throughout the indoor soccer season in the cooler months as well.

'It makes us feel a lot safer,' says ref

Misley said just last year a 16-year-old girl was surrounded by parents in the parking lot after refereeing a match and was physically assaulted. In another instance, a player who received a red card in a men's game chased a referee around the field with a machete, according to Misley.

Referees who officiated games while wearing cameras on Sunday told CBC Toronto the devices are having an impact.

"It makes us feel a lot safer," said 21-year-old Angelina Baldino, who's in her fifth year of refereeing. "[There] have been some instances in my past refereeing career where I felt like I've needed one."

In her experience, she said people have threatened to follow her to a car because of her refereeing.

"Cameras could have definitely helped in those situations, either as a deterrent or to just capture the incident," she said.

Michael Cotton, a parent at the soccer centre on Sunday, thinks the initiative is a good one. (Igor Petrov/CBC)

Baldino said she's seen refs quit because the abuse was too much to handle.

"There are definitely really hard games where you stop and go, 'Why am I putting myself through this?'"

Lara Yassine has been reffing since she was 13 and said the abuse took a toll in her early years.

"It can put a lot of stress on you," she said. "At the end of the day, you're a student, right? And you're just a human being."

Michael Cotton, a parent at the soccer centre on Sunday, thinks the initiative is a good one. He said everyone gets wrapped up in the heat of the game, but there's one group of people at the pitch that need to exercise more patience.

"I would say the parents, maybe they're the ones that need to lower the temperature the most," he said. "We're not doing the world cup here, it's regional play."

ONTARIO

Barrie wanted to ban donations to homeless people on its property. Advocates are sending the plan to the UN

CBC
Sun, September 24, 2023

Alex Nuttall, the city's mayor, said city hall is

A coalition of advocacy organizations is taking a previously proposed Barrie bylaw amendment to the United Nations as an example of a policy that criminalizes homelessness in Canada.

In May and June, the city north of Toronto proposed and then walked back two bylaw amendments that would have made it illegal for people and charitable groups to distribute food, literature, clothes, tents and tarps to unhoused people on public property.

The proposal was sent back to staff for review in June but was discussed again at a community safety committee meeting on Tuesday. A date for another council vote on the bylaw has yet to be set.

After Tuesday's meeting, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition and Pivot Legal society sent the proposed bylaw amendments to the UN's rapporteurs on the right to adequate housing and extreme poverty. The intergovernmental agency has put out a call for laws impacting unhoused people for a report on decriminalizing homelessness, with a submission deadline of early October.

The proposed amendments were shared along with several other policy examples from British Columbia.

"We're very concerned about the direction that the city [of Barrie] is taking and so we thought it was important to raise alongside a number of other bylaws across the country for consideration and context for the United Nations analysis," said DJ Larkin, the executive director of the drug policy coalition.

DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, said Barrie's proposal stood out as a particularly bad example of the potential criminalization of people who are unhoused in Canada.

DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, said Barrie's proposal stood out as a particularly bad example of the potential criminalization of people who are unhoused in Canada. (Submitted by DJ Larkin)

Alex Nuttall, the city's mayor, did not grant CBC Toronto with an interview for this story. In an email, he said city hall is "confused" as to why the organizations involved sent the proposals to the UN for examination.

"Council's intent was clear not to deter individual acts of kindness," he said.

In their report, the coalition says it's not aware of any substantive changes to the proposal. At Tuesday's meeting, city staff said council will have a revised proposal for the bylaws by the end of the calendar year.

When introduced, the proposed bylaw amendments also appeared to make it illegal for charitable organizations to provide supplies to unhoused people on city property. CBC Toronto asked Nuttall if there would still be restrictions on what charities do in the revised bylaw amendment proposals. Nuttall did not respond prior to publication.

Advocates want amendments rescinded entirely

The coalition's report to the UN was endorsed by Barrie Housing and Homelessness Justice Network, of which Michael Speers is a member. He says they'd ultimately like to see the proposed bylaw amendments rescinded.

"If they're determined to to go ahead with some type of bylaw [amendment], if they want to modernize the language, then we will be happy to submit language that is written through a human human rights lens," he said.

Speers was also critical of the city's current approach to the homelessness issue.

"They don't want to provide any real solutions that lift people up, they want to basically push people out," he said.

Michael Speers wants the city to rescind its proposed amendments instead of revising their language.

Michael Speers wants the city to rescind its proposed amendments instead of revising their language. (CBC)

Rob Romanek, chair of the civic engagement organization Engage Barrie, echoed Speers's calls for the proposals to be rescinded.

"To backpedal and say, 'No, that's not what we meant.' Well then take them out because that's what it says," Romanek said.

In response to criticism, the mayor said he's been "a longtime advocate for treatments and support for the community."

In a separate email, a city spokesperson said Barrie will spend at least $1.6 million on initiatives like a warming centre and food security programs over the next two years.

In preparing the coalition's report, Larkin said Barrie's proposal stood out as a particularly bad example of the criminalization of people who are unhoused.

"At the United Nations level, we are hoping to demonstrate how Canada's failure to address the overlapping crises of toxic drugs, homelessness and income insecurity are playing out on our streets," Larkin said.

A year after Fiona, a traumatized Newfoundland town backs away from the sea

The Canadian Press
Sun, September 24, 2023 



ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — One year after a wave driven by post-tropical storm Fiona slammed into the back of her house and twisted it like a corkscrew, Lori Dicks now lives up on a hill, far from the water.

She still has a view of the ocean, but she's far enough away that there's no chance it will swell up and swallow her entire life again like it did on the morning of Sept. 24, 2022, in Port aux Basques, N.L.

"I still think about it all the time. So much change has happened for us, for everyone. Even the whole town I find is affected, even the landscape has changed," she said in a recent interview from her new home across the province in Burin Bay Arm, N.L. "On our side of the street where all our homes were, it's completely gone. All of our homes are torn down now."

Fiona destroyed about 100 homes that morning in southwestern Newfoundland, and a 73-year-old woman died when she was swept out to sea. Houses that had belonged to families for generations were washed away or destroyed, and some lost everything inside their home.

Dicks and her husband Claude had lived in their Port aux Basques home for nearly three decades. They raised their daughter there. After Fiona cracked its foundation, the house was deemed too dangerous to return to, and it was condemned. Dicks was allowed back in for a brief time to remove what she could.

She feels lucky she was able to salvage anything at all.

Port aux Basques has now established what it calls the high-impact zone — an area deemed to be most at risk for severe damage from storms, even those with a fraction of Fiona's power. Some residents call it the "Fiona line."

Within that line, more than 80 homes were washed away by Fiona or later torn down after damage wrought by the storm left them uninhabitable, Mayor Brian Button said in an interview. Another 57 houses behind the line are still standing and occupied. Button said the owners will be bought out by the province so they can move somewhere else.

The provincial government has paid out about $41.6 million in compensation to people in southwestern Newfoundland who lost their homes in the storm, according to a statement from the Department of Justice and Public Safety. Owners of the 57 homes sill inside the impact zone will receive at least $200 per square foot for their houses, as well as money for their land, the department said.

The decisions to move people have been devastating to make, Button said, but they were necessary: Fiona crumbled so much of the town's shoreline into the sea, those houses are now dangerously close to the water.

"The whole thing is very emotional," he said. "We see all the damage that's around, that's visible. But nobody has realized the mental health aspect that this has had on the community."

"For me, personally, it's been a struggle ... just to mentally try to keep it together and deal with it all," he added.

Beyond the long hours and gut-wrenching decisions required of him as the volunteer mayor of a town beset by a crushing disaster, he's borne the brunt of some residents' grief. Heartbroken residents have yelled at him, only to approach him later in tears to apologize, he said.

"I've had people say to me, 'Well, you don't understand you didn't lose anything.'" But Button said he has sat with hundreds of affected families, and he's heard their stories and cried with them.

Ashley Smith is owner and managing director of St. John's-based climate consulting firm Fundamental Inc. She says that as the planet warms and powerful storms are expected to hit more frequently, the difficult discussions forced upon Port aux Basques need to happen in other coastal communities.

She uses the term "managed retreat" to describe a process of identifying vulnerable coastal areas, and perhaps enacting bylaws against building new homes in those areas and moving people out of them, just as Port aux Basques is doing.

"Any community along the coast is going to be vulnerable. Especially the small ones that are largely unchanged from like 50, 60, 70, 100 years ago," Smith said in a recent interview. "Most of the very small communities along (Newfoundland's) very long coasts are positioned right on the water ... and that is a vulnerable situation."

Nova Scotia's Atlantic coast is also vulnerable, she noted, as are parts of Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

Conversations about managed retreat are fraught, she acknowledges. Asking people to leave behind homes that in many cases were built by family members generations ago is not easy. Most towns also don't have the data they need to inform those decisions, she added.

But it will be safer and less traumatic for communities to begin the work voluntarily, rather than have it be forced upon them by a storm like Fiona, she said.

In their hilltop home in Burin Bay Arm, Dicks and her husband have started over. She's rebuilt her hairstyling business in her new community, and she's a short drive away from her 29-year-old daughter, who is set to give birth next month — Dicks's first grandchild.

But she still fights back tears when she speaks about the morning Fiona hit, and the way it changed her life forever. She worries about her husband, who watched helplessly as the wave crashed into their house. Even their dog, Cooper, is having a hard time, she said.

She misses her neighbours back in Port aux Basques but doesn't think she could handle regularly passing by her old neighbourhood, where many of the homes are gone.

"In a way, I'm glad I'm not there to drive around on our street and see it," she said. "Because I don't think I could get past it, to tell you the truth."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 24, 2023.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press

Money, power and an ecosystem are all at stake in Canada-U.S. negotiations over a massive river


CBC
Sun, September 24, 2023 

The Dalles Dam is located on the Columbia River about 140 kilometres east of Portland, Ore. Canada and the U.S. are negotiating the future of a treaty that helps control water flow and hydroelectric power benefits from dams along the Columbia.

 (Jessie Wardarski/AP - image credit)

Walk along the banks of the Columbia River in B.C. and you might be forgiven for thinking it's like any of the province's other big waterways. You might spot a sturgeon, or glimpse one of the more than 60 dams in the Columbia's watershed.

But the Columbia is not like other rivers. For one, it crosses the U.S. border to empty into the Pacific in Oregon. The Columbia River basin is also a vital source of electricity, providing about 40 per cent ofall U.S. hydroelectric power, while B.C. draws almost half of its total electrical generation from the region.

Those dams also provide flood control, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the massive1948 floods that left about 50 people dead and 46,000 without homes.

But what makes the river truly special is the unique treaty that governs those dams.

Hammered out between Canada and the United States and ratified in 1964, the treaty outlines control of the river's water flow and benefits from that bonanza of hydroelectric power, including the tens of millions of dollars a year that come with it.

The Columbia River Treaty is being negotiated again — a process that has already lasted years — and the potential deal could have profound consequences both for the electrical output of the river and the people and wildlife that depend on it.

In an interview on CBC Radio's The House that aired Saturday, B.C.'s chief negotiator, Kathy Eichenberger, said the Canadian government had a few key priorities, including retaining greater flexibility over water flows in Canada and adding considerations around the river ecosystem "as a third leg of the stool of the treaty that is based on power generation and and flood control."

Negotiators have been locked in round after round of talks, with the 19th round scheduled for October in Portland, Ore.

Some provisions of the treaty are set to expire in September 2024, after which Canada could provide flood control services to the United States on an ad hoc basis.

"We need to take the time to improve a treaty that's in dire need of renewal and incorporating things like ecosystems, salmon, adaptive management, climate change," Eichenberger told host Catherine Cullen.

"These are all new concepts that weren't discussed in the original treaty," she said.

Value of the 'Canadian Entitlement'

The Americans have their own concerns for the revised treaty, with the value of hydroelectric power going back to Canada perhaps first and foremost.

That share of the power is called the "Canadian Entitlement"

"We're giving Canada a giant power plant's worth of output every year," Scott Simms, chair of the Columbia River Treaty Power Group, told The Seattle Times in August. "It might be transactionally easier to push wheelbarrows of cash up and dump them at the Canadian border."

Eichenberger countered that Canada believed it could prove that what it receives is half of the incremental benefit of power generation.

Dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries

Dams on the Columbia River and its tributaries (U.S. Army Corp of Engineers)

"How we manage flows in Canada really increases [the Americans'] ability to generate more electricity to meet their citizens and industrial needs," Eichenberger said.

"That's the fundamental principle of the treaty … creating a benefit and sharing it equitably. And that's our North Star," she said.

Seeking protection for the ecosystem

Even though Columbia River region ecosystems were not a primary concern in the original negotiations, they have long been a concern of Indigenous groups, who are now a prominent part of the Canadian negotiating team.

Fish stocks, particularly around salmon, are a major concern.

"[Salmon is] beyond just important for our people," Penticton Indian Band elder Chad Eneas told Bob Keating, a freelance journalist who spoke with people around the valley as part of a documentary for The House.

"I think it's important in terms of it being a keystone species in the Columbia."

Others who live or work alongside the river have different concerns, such as the impact of lands lost when dams and reservoirs were built along the river.

Twin sisters Janet and Crystal Spicer were raised in a Nakusp, B.C., family that farmed near the Arrow Lakes, which is part of the Columbia River system. The farm was lost when the Hugh Keenleyside Dam was constructed in 1968.

"The whole thing is so short-sighted. And it's irrecoverable. That's the thing. It's not like it can be put back. It can't. I think it was a shocking act of violence and cruelty to just drown us out," said Janet Spicer, who still grows on what's left of a property farmed by her father.

The Duncan Dam in the Purcell Mountains is one of three B.C. dams built as part of the Columbia River Treaty, signed with the U.S. in 1964. In return for building the Mica, Keenleyside and Duncan dams, which provide water storage for power generation in the U.S., B.C. is entitled to half the additional power generated because of the water storage.

The Duncan Dam in the Purcell Mountains is one of three B.C. dams built as part of the Columbia River Treaty, signed with the U.S. in 1964. In return for building the Mica, Keenleyside and Duncan dams, which provide water storage for power generation in the U.S., B.C. is entitled to half the additional power generated because of the water storage. (Government of B.C.)

"The farmland won't come back, but people want a living river," added her sister Crystal Spicer.

Canadians along the river have been advocating for Canada to retain greater control of water flows to make the fluctuation less dramatic and less destructive to ecosystems.

Author Eileen Delahanty Pearkes said it's key that the river's ecosystem and residents are kept in mind at the negotiating table.

"All of the health of the land and water in this region depends on flow. The details of it are less important — Canada getting this or the U.S. getting that," she said.

"I love the words of one Indigenous advocate: 'One river for the benefit of all.'"

NASA's first asteroid samples land on Earth after release from spacecraft

The Canadian Press
Sun, September 24, 2023 



NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space parachuted into the Utah desert Sunday to cap a seven-year journey.

In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 63,000 miles (100,000 kilometers) out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the mothership set off after another asteroid.

“We have touchdown!” Mission Recovery Operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — around 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) — basing it on the deceleration rate.

To everyone's relief, the capsule was intact and not breached, keeping its 4.5 billion-year-old samples free of contamination. Within two hours of touchdown, the capsule was inside a temporary clean room at the Defense Department's Utah Test and Training Range, hoisted there by helicopter.

The sealed sample canister will be flown on Monday to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will be opened in a new, specially designed lab. The building already houses the hundreds of pounds (kilograms) of moon rocks gathered by the Apollo astronauts.

“We can’t wait to crack into it. For me, the real science is just beginning," said the mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona. He'll accompany the samples all the way to Texas.

Lori Glaze, NASA's planetary science division director, added: “Those are going to be a treasure for scientific analysis for years and years and years to come.”

Scientists estimate the capsule holds at least a cup of rubble from the carbon-rich asteroid known as Bennu, but won’t know for sure until the container is opened in a day or two. Some spilled and floated away when the spacecraft scooped up too much material, which jammed the container’s lid during collection three years ago.

Japan, the only other country to bring back samples, gathered about a teaspoon during a pair of asteroid missions.

The pebbles and dust delivered Sunday represent the biggest haul from beyond the moon. Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples will help scientists better understand how Earth and life formed, providing “an extraordinary glimpse" of 4.5 billion years ago, said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

Osiris-Rex, the mothership, rocketed away on the $1 billion mission in 2016. It reached Bennu two years later and, using a long stick vacuum, grabbed rubble from the small roundish space rock in 2020. By the time it returned, the spacecraft had logged 4 billion miles (6.2 billion kilometers).

At a news conference several hours later, Lauretta said he broke into tears of joy upon hearing that the capsule's main parachute had opened.

“I knew we had made it home," he said, so overwhelmed with emotion when he arrived at the scene that he wanted to hug the capsule, sooty but undamaged and not even bent.

Flight controllers for spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin stood and applauded the touchdown from their base in Colorado. NASA camera views showed the charred capsule upside down on the sand with its parachute disconnected and strewn nearby, as the recovery team moved in via helicopters.

“Boy, did we stick that landing,” Lauretta said. “It didn’t move, it didn’t roll, it didn’t bounce. It just made a tiny little divot in the Utah soil.”

British astronomer Daniel Brown, who was not involved in the mission, said he expects “great things" from NASA's largest sample return since the Apollo moon landings more than a half-century ago. With these asteroid samples, “we are edging closer to understanding its early chemical composition, the formation of water and the molecules life is based on," he added from Nottingham Trent University.

One Osiris-Rex team member was stuck in England, rehearsing for a concert tour. “My heart’s there with you as this precious sample is recovered,” Queen's lead guitarist Brian May, who's also an astrophysicist, said in a prerecorded message. “Happy Sample Return Day.”

Engineers estimate the canister holds 250 grams (8.82 ounces) of material from Bennu, plus or minus 100 grams (3.53 ounces). Even at the low end, it will easily surpass the minimum requirement of the mission, Lauretta said.

It will take a few weeks to get a precise measurement, said NASA’s lead curator Nicole Lunning.

NASA plans a public show-and-tell in October.

Currently orbiting the sun 50 million miles (81 million kilometers) from Earth, Bennu is about one-third of a mile (one-half of a kilometer) across, roughly the size of the Empire State Building but shaped like a spinning top. It’s believed to be the broken fragment of a much larger asteroid.

During a two-year survey, Osiris-Rex found Bennu to be a chunky rubble pile full of boulders and craters. The surface was so loose that the spacecraft’s vacuum arm sank a foot or two (0.5 meters) into the asteroid, sucking up more material than anticipated.

These close-up observations may come in handy late next century. Bennu is expected to come dangerously close to Earth in 2182 — possibly close enough to hit. The data gleaned by Osiris-Rex will help with any asteroid-deflection effort, according to Lauretta.

Osiris-Rex is already chasing after the asteroid Apophis, and will reach it in 2029.

This was NASA’s third sample return from a deep-space robotic mission. The Genesis spacecraft dropped off bits of solar wind in 2004, but the samples were compromised when the parachute failed and the capsule slammed into the ground. The Stardust spacecraft successfully delivered comet dust in 2006.

NASA’s plans to return samples from Mars are on hold after an independent review board criticized the cost and complexity. The Martian rover Perseverance has spent the past two years collecting core samples for eventual transport to Earth.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

WE ARE ALL RACE TRAITORS

Science paints a new picture of the ancient past, when we mixed and mated with other kinds of humans

Sun, September 24, 2023 


What does it mean to be human?

For a long time, the answer seemed clear. Our species, Homo sapiens — with our complex thoughts and deep emotions — were the only true humans to ever walk the Earth. Earlier forms, like the Neanderthals, were thought to be just steps along the path of evolution, who died out because we were better versions.

That picture is now changing.

In recent years, researchers have gained the power to pull DNA from ancient hominins, including our early ancestors and other relatives who walked on two legs. Ancient DNA technology has revolutionized the way we study human history and has quickly taken off, with a constant stream of studies exploring the genes of long-ago people.

Along with more fossils and artifacts, the DNA findings are pointing us to a challenging idea: We're not so special. For most of human history we shared the planet with other kinds of early humans, and those now-extinct groups were a lot like us.

“We can see them as being fully human. But, interestingly, a different kind of human,” said Chris Stringer, a human evolution expert at London’s Natural History Museum. “A different way to be human.”

What's more, humans had close — even intimate — interactions with some of these other groups, including Neanderthals, Denisovans and “ghost populations” we only know from DNA.

“It’s a unique time in human history when there are only one of us,” Stringer said.

A WORLD WITH MANY HOMININS

Scientists now know that after H. sapiens first showed up in Africa around 300,000 years ago, they overlapped with a whole cast of other hominins, explained Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program.

Neanderthals were hanging out in Europe. Homo heidelbergensis and Homo naledi were living in Africa. The short-statured Homo floresiensis, sometimes known as the “Hobbit,” was living in Indonesia, while the long-legged Homo erectus was loping around Asia.

Scientists started to realize all these hominins weren’t our direct ancestors. Instead, they were more like our cousins: lineages that split off from a common source and headed in different directions.

Archaeological finds have shown some of them had complex behaviors. Neanderthals painted cave walls, Homo heidelbergensis hunted large animals like rhinos and hippos, and some scientists think even the small-brained Homo naledi was burying its dead in South African cave systems. A study last week found early humans were building structures with wood before H. sapiens evolved.

Researcher also wondered: If these other kinds of humans were not so different, did our ancestors have sex with them?

For some, the mixing was hard to imagine. Many argued that as H. sapiens ventured out of Africa, they replaced other groups without mating. Archaeologist John Shea of New York’s Stony Brook University said he used to think of Neanderthals and H. sapiens as rivals, believing “if they bumped into each other, they’d probably kill each other.”

DNA REVEALS ANCIENT SECRETS

But DNA has revealed there were other interactions, ones that changed who we are today.

In 2010, the Swedish geneticist Svante Paabo and his team pieced a tricky puzzle together. They were able to assemble fragments of ancient DNA into a full Neanderthal genome, a feat that was long thought to be impossible and won Paabo a Nobel Prize last year.

This ability to read ancient DNA revolutionized the field, and it is constantly improving.

For example, when scientists applied these techniques to a pinky bone and some huge molars found in a Siberian cave, they found genes that didn’t match anything seen before, said Bence Viola, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who was part of the research team that made the discovery. It was a new species of hominin, now known as Denisovans, who were the first human cousins identified only by their DNA.

Armed with these Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes, scientists could compare them to people today and look for chunks of DNA that match. When they did, they found clear signs of crossover.

THE NEW HUMAN STORY

The DNA evidence showed that H. sapiens mated with groups including Neanderthals and Denisovans. It even revealed evidence of other “ghost populations” — groups who are part of our genetic code, but whose fossils we haven’t found yet.

It’s hard to pin down exactly when and where these interactions happened. Our ancestors seem to have mixed with the Neanderthals soon after leaving Africa and heading into Europe. They probably bumped into the Denisovans in parts of East and Southeast Asia.

“They didn’t have a map, they didn’t know where they were going,” the Smithsonian's Potts said. “But looking over the next hillside into the next valley, (they) ran into populations of people that looked a bit different from themselves, but mated, exchanged genes.”

So even though Neanderthals did look distinct from H. sapiens — from their bigger noses to their shorter limbs — it wasn’t enough to create a “wall” between the groups, Shea said.

“They probably thought, ‘Oh, these guys look a little bit different,’” Shea said. “‘Their skin color’s a little different. Their faces look a little different. But they’re cool guys, let’s go try to talk to them.’”

COMPLEX NEANDERTHALS

The idea that modern humans, and particularly white humans, were the pinnacle of evolution came from a time of “colonialism and elitism,” said Janet Young, curator of physical anthropology at the Canadian Museum of History.

One Neanderthal painting, created to reflect the vision of a eugenics advocate, made its way through decades of textbooks and museum displays.

The new findings have completely upended the idea that earlier, more ape-like creatures started standing up straighter and getting more complex until they reached their peak form in H. sapiens, Young said. Along with the genetic evidence, other archaeological finds have shown Neanderthals had complex behaviors around hunting, cooking, using tools and even making art.

Still, even though we now know our ancient human cousins were like us — and make up part of who we are now — the idea of ape-like cave men has been hard to dislodge.

Artist John Gurche is trying. He specializes in creating lifelike models of ancient humans for museums, including the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History, in hopes of helping public perception catch up to the science.

Skulls and sculptures gazed out from the shelves of his studio earlier this year as he worked on a Neanderthal head, punching pieces of hair into the silicone skin.

Bringing the new view to the public hasn’t been easy, Gurche said: “This caveman image is very persistent.”

For Gurche, getting the science right is crucial. He has worked on dissections of humans and apes to understand their anatomy, but also hopes to bring out emotion in his portrayals.

“These were once living, breathing individuals. And they felt grief and joy and pain,” Gurche said. “They’re not in some fairyland; they’re not some fantasy creatures. They were alive.”

MANY CONNECTIONS STILL TO BE FOUND

Scientists can’t get useful genetic information out of every fossil they find, especially if it’s really old or in the wrong climate. They haven't been able to gather much ancient DNA from Africa, where H. sapiens first evolved, because it has been degraded by heat and moisture.

Still, many are hopeful that as DNA technology keeps advancing, we’ll be able to push further into the past and get ancient genomes from more parts of the world, adding more brushstrokes to our picture of human history.

Because even though we were the only ones to survive, the other extinct groups played a key role in our history, and our present. They are part of a common humanity connecting every person, said Mary Prendergast, a Rice University archeologist.

“If you look at the fossil record, the archeological record, the genetic record," she said, "you see that we share far more in common than what divides us.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Maddie Burakoff And Laura Ungar, The Associated Press

Archaeologists unearth the largest cemetery ever discovered in Gaza and find rare lead sarcophogi


Sun, September 24, 2023 


GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Palestinian workers in the Gaza Strip have found dozens of ancient graves, including two sarcophagi made of lead, in a Roman-era cemetery — a site dating back some 2,000 years that archaeologists describe as the largest cemetery discovered in Gaza.

Workers came upon the site last year during the construction of an Egyptian-funded housing project near Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip. Since then, crews have worked to excavate the 2,700-square-meter (2/3 acre) site with the support of French experts.

Now, what was once an inconspicuous construction lot — surrounded by a grove of nondescript apartment buildings — has become a gold mine for archaeologists looking to understand more about the Gaza Strip.

Gaza, a coastal enclave home to some 2.3 million people, has a rich history stemming from its location on ancient trade routes between Egypt and the Levant. But a number of factors — Israeli occupation, Hamas’ 16-year takeover of the territory and rapid urban growth — have conspired to endanger many of the besieged strip’s archaeological treasures.

Against this backdrop, the discovery of 60 graves at the site in January marked a major finding, archaeologists say. That number has swelled to 135.

Rene Elter, a French archaeologist leading the dig, said researchers have studied over 100 of the graves.

“All of these tombs have almost already been excavated and have revealed a huge amount of information about the cultural material and also about the state of health of the population and the pathologies from which this population may have suffered,” said Elter, the head of archaeology for ”Intiqal," a program managed by the French nonprofit Première Urgence Internationale.

Elter pointed to the sarcophagi made of lead — one featuring ornate grape leaves, the other with images of dolphins — as exceptional finds.

“The discovery of lead sarcophagi here is a first for Gaza,” he said.

Given the rarity of the lead tombs, Palestinian archaeologists like Fadel Al-Otul suspect that social elites are buried there. Al-Otul said the cemetery probably used to be located in a city — Romans used to place cemeteries near city centers.

Alongside the sarcophagi, Elter’s team is restoring unearthed skeletons and piecing together shards of clay jars.

The skeletons discovered at the site will be sent out of Gaza for additional analysis, according to Al-Otul. The remains are set to return to the Hamas-led Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism.

Elter said the territory needs a dedicated team to oversee archaeological activity in Gaza.

“The Gazans deserve to tell their stories,” he said. “Gaza boasts a plethora of potential archaeological sites, but monitoring each one, given the rapid pace of development, is no small feat."

Issam Adwan, The Associated Press

INTRO & OUTRO

South African firefighters say farewell to Canada with traditional dance

CBC Vancouver

Sep 22, 2023  

After helping battle wildfires in B.C., crews from South Africa said goodbye with a cultural performance at their camp in Prince George.

South African firefighters sing and dance after arriving at Edmonton's airport

CTV News
 Jun 9, 2023 

EDMONTON INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT

More than 200 South African firefighters deployed to help combat Canada's wildfires performed a dance at Edmonton's airport.