tag concrete-costs
Director of another national lab visited us during wildfires. Healthy. Barely made it through a presentation, labored breathing.
https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2025/rncan-nrcan/Fo143-2-463-eng.pdf
In our case studies, the federal government covered 5% to approximately 20% of the total cost of the wildfires to pay for immediate relief of the people impacted and recovery within the region. Private insurance company payouts for property losses and temporary accommodations ranged from minimal, where there was only the loss of uninsured properties, to a high of 56.6% of the total costs. Individual and private donations
to wildfire relief funds covered up to 2.8% of the total costs. Individual households, businesses, not-for-profit organisations, and local governments absorbed the remainder of the costs
Disaster is a social phenomenon that results when a hazard (e.g., wildfire) intersects with a vulnerable community in a way that exceeds or overwhelms the community’s ability to cope and may cause serious harm to the safety, health, welfare, property, or environment of people (Public Safety Canada 2017).
what a fascinating definition of disaster.
Prior to 2023, the maximum area
burned was 7.5 million ha in 1989. However, in 2023, the
area burned exceeded 15 million ha (CIFFC 2023). A recent
study has found that over the past couple decades the
frequency of very large wildfires has increased in Canada
(Hanes et al. 2019).
Cochrane (2004) critically evaluated past studies on the economic
impact assessment of disasters and reported that these studies
suffer from five major shortcomings
Richardson et al. (2012) estimated the economic value of health
effects of wildfire smoke at $12.92 per exposed person per day using
the cost of illness (COI) method based on information from the
2009 Station Fire in California.
5 million people in Alberta * $12 / day * 30 days = $1.8 billion/month during fire season.
To put that in scale, the alberta government as a whole spends on the order of $6
e 2003 Kelowna Fire in BC using data from the provincial
Medical Services Plan and compared these visits with the
corresponding weekly aggregates number of visits of 10 previous
years (1993–2002). Of the six-week period observed around the
wildfire, physician visits for respiratory diseases were significant
for three weeks (second, fourth and fifth), and the average number
of visits during this time was 5.74 per 10000 people in 2003,
compared to the average of 3.58 per 10000 people for the 10
previous years. Thus, the average visits in 2003 for these three
weeks increased by 2.16 visits per 10000 people in the Kelowna,
BC region. It was reported that the concentration of PM2.5 (fine
particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometres) and PM10 (fine
particulate matter smaller than 10 micrometres) reached peaks
of 200 µg/m3 and 250 µg/m3, respectively, six days after the fire
began. In addition, [that] study reported that wildfire smoke effects
on visits for cardiovascular diseases and mental disorders were
unchanged from the 10-year average prior to the wildfire.
The authors used the existing dose-response functions based on
urban air pollution related to particulate matter (i.e., the
Environment Canada’s Air Quality Valuation Model 3.0).
The study revealed that each additional day of exposure to any wildfire smoke during pregnancy was associated with an 0.49% (95% Confidence Interval (CI):
0.41%–0.59%) increase in risk of preterm birth. A week of smoke
exposure, which was the median duration of exposure observed
during the study period in California, translated to a 3.4% increase
in preterm birth risk relative to an unexposed mother (Heft-Neal
et al. 2022).
While interpreting the results of these mental health surveys, it is
important to acknowledge that the population of Fort McMurray
was already struggling economically due to the collapse of the
oil industry in 2014 (Ritchie et al. 2018). It is possible that a large
proportion of the families were already financially affected and
that this may have diminished their ability to recover from the
wildfire.
[needed information] may exist
within public health agency. However, this health information is not publicly available.
As a result, while obviously significant, we did
not include the economic and social cost of direct and indirect
impacts of wildfire on human health, including mental health, in
the case studies.
the science is not yet able to characterize the exposure-response functions
related to cardiovascular effects, specific causes of mortality, birth
outcomes, and mental health outcomes (Reid et al. 2016)
While it is possible to value these emissions, for example
using the social costs of carbon values used by the governments
of US and Canada (Social cost of greenhouse gas emissions –
Canada.ca), it was not reasonable to do so for the current study.
First, the scope of this cost accounting exercise is regional and
social costs of carbon are global.
I think this is a pretty heavy hitting ending:
One cost category not accounted for was the diversion of resources
to recover from the wildfire, or opportunity costs (investing in local
infrastructure and government services including children and
families, education, healthcare, libraries and recreation centres).
These are all the resources that would have been used for some
other productive use if the wildfire had not occurred and damaged
assets of value.
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