“It’s very hard to know what the impacts will be on fish and other aquatic organisms,” Timoney said.Īlberta officials say they will be taking water samples in the region to measure any changes. 24' 1 Royals Western Red Cedar Shingles 2 100+ viewed in past week 28599 List: 395. While a heavy rain is the only way to extinguish the fire, that would be bad for the river. 1-48 of 630 results for 'cedar shingles' Results Price and other details may vary based on product size and color. There are already a lot of contaminants from oil sands production in the Athabasca river and sediments and the runoff from the fire will only make this worse, said Kevin Timoney, an ecologist at Treeline Ecological Research. The first good rain will result in a massive “toxic surge” into waterways including the Athabasca river that runs through the middle of Fort McMurray, said Schindler. However little is known how the release of contaminants in fires might play into human health impacts, said Dr Merritt Turetsky of the University of Guelph. Fires are a known hazard mainly because small particles can damage lungs. ![]() The smoke from the fires has travelled across the US to the Gulf coast, 3,400 km away. People in Fort McMurray at the height of the fire were likely “breathing lungfuls of toxins,” Schindler told the Guardian. There’s a lot of stuff like housing shingles, cars, couches and so on that produce a wide range of toxins including mercury, lead and organic compounds, said David Schindler, a retired aquatic scientist formerly at the University of Alberta. Even worse were the toxins released by burning the 2,400 buildings and their contents. There is little doubt the fire would have mobilised contaminants, with mercury, other heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) deposited on trees and soils, making the smoke potentially more toxic than a normal forest fire. “We will have some rough estimates in a week or two,” Flannigan told the Guardian. ![]() CO2 emissions from the fire are not expected to be significant on a global scale “unless a lot of peat burned,” said Dr Mike Flannigan, professor of renewable resources at the University of Alberta. That compares to Alberta’s 274m tonnes in 2014 - the majority of which is from the province’s energy sector. Photograph: Jeff McIntosh/AP Climate changeĪt a rough estimate, the fire will have resulted in a few million tonnes of CO2 emitted. A flock of geese flies through smoke from the Fort McMurray wildfire.
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