'These Are Fires That Are Beyond Resources'

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In a new book, a Vancouver photojournalist tracks the toll of intense wildfires on the people who fight them.
Jen St. Denis
18 Jun 2026
18 Jun 2026The Tyee
Jen St. Denis is a reporter and senior editor with The Tyee. You can follow her on Bluesky, Instagram or TikTok.
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In a new book, a Vancouver photojournalist tracks the toll of intense wildfires on the people who fight them. … Article written by Jen St. Denis.
Jesse Winter is a reporter and photojournalist who loves being out in the field, experiencing news events at maximum intensity. (I once heard him answer the question "What have you been up to?" with "Oh, you know, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.")
He's been writing about and photographing B.C. wildfires since 2018, at one point taking the initial wildfire training so he could get closer to both fires and the BC Wildfire Service workers who fight them.
It was both a good and a terrible time to develop an expertise on wildfire reporting. Western Canadians have always lived with forest fires, but over the past decade fires have become more frequent, more intense giants that create their own weather and overwhelm understanding. Fort McMurray in 2016 marked a turning point in driving home to Canadians that we are living in a new reality — a desperate scramble to evacuate through flames, a part of your town burned down.
After Fort McMurray, there was the destruction of Lytton in 2023, then the conflagration of Jasper in 2024. And in 2023, two B.C. wildfire fighters died in incidents just weeks apart.
In his new book Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze, Winter has captured his own experience covering wildfires and the perspectives of the red-shirted corps who work these fires. It's journalistic work that takes time and care, because the cone of silence and secrecy that pervades most Canadian public agencies is very much in place when it comes to wildfire fighters.
Along with a stark warning about labour conditions and the tiny size of Canadian wildfire resources compared with those of other countries, Winter's book includes incredibly dramatic scenes of some of the most controversial wildfire responses in the past three years, including the Adams Lake wildfire in B.C.'s Shuswap region in 2023, the evacuation of Yellowknife in 2023 and the Jasper fire in 2024.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: Your book has a really strong focus on labour issues inside BC Wildlife Service and other wildfire services as well across Canada. Why was that important to explore?
Jesse Winter: When I was able to access these spaces, when you spend all day with a crew, they talk. I wasn't doing formal interviews but just getting to know them and understand their frustrations and the realities of their workplace.
I started to hear over and over concerns about high levels of turnover, high levels of burnout. There's this sort of downward pressure that crew leaders and crew supervisors are juggling — it's harder for them to do their job if they are in charge of a crew that's 30 or 40 per cent rookies.
What I started to see, particularly in 2023, was the ways in which all of this sort of downward pressure on crews was making things unsafe.
Firefighters often talk about safety as sort of a Swiss cheese model. Like someone's inexperience could be a hole in the system, broken equipment could be a hole in the system, but as long as those holes never line up, as long as the safety layers are thick enough, then crews are protected.
What's been happening more and more is that things like turnover and burnout, and bigger, longer fire seasons, all of those things are starting to create a scenario where...