MUSKOKA’S ON FIRE WITH CLIMATE MODEL DATA PREDICTING FIERY DIRE DISTRICT DESTRUCTION

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Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com

Is it “unthinkable” Muskoka may burn up this summer?

Not according to a startling front page “Toronto Star” story this week that sparked claims it conceivably could.

“The idea of Muskoka disappearing in a conflagration … you just don’t want to go there…,” said John Vaillant, author of “Fire Weather,” a short-listed Pulitzer Prize book studying climate change and wild fires.

Neither do we.

“All you need is a heat dome, wind and fire. But that’s possible. These are unlikely times.”

That’s because science north projections are wild and crazy.

Despite all the big the Muskoka Lakes wild fire storms around the country demonstrate how they can leap across large bodies of water.

If L.A. can burn, so can Toronto and its Muskoka playground.

A Gravenhurst Fire Department recruitment post notes the importance of fighting wildfires as part of its job which is heating up this summer. PHOTO GFD

Researcher John Braun didn’t believe it in 2009 when he claimed we were fire safe.

And our lakes were a fire wall.

Today it’s not so “unthinkable” he said after admitting that modelling was all wrong, because of fundamental flaws in calculating the risk that made his model un-“trustworthy” due to obsolete historical data that makes it impossible to predict.

Changing climate patterns counter old thinking, he now concedes.

Sixteen years ago he was asked what it would take for Muskoka to go up in smoke? He tried to push the old model to make it happen. “It just wouldn’t go” till 2025.

“If you get a gold solid, dry summer like we’ve had, you dry everything out and then you get a little bit of dry lightning, then all bets are off,” the UBC statistics prof added.

And while Muskoka wildfires remain grounded now, there’s no saying winds won’t whip them into the air where they can spread like, well, wildfire.

Feeling the heat this week? Try fighting fires.

Already Ontario is feeling and fearing the worst hit by a shortage of trained firefighting crews this hot season.

This after fires ravaged Ontario two summers ago when MPP Graydon Smith was burnt as MNRF minister when they scorched the earth.

That was when Parry Sound-Muskoka had its own threats from small fires around Kearney, as well as a couple to the near north around Sudbury.

And also after the Huntsville, Lake of Bays Fire Department just responded to two fire, one of which was unattended and the other intentionally set.

Muskoka’s Peter Gilgan helps Toronto, Mississauga

hospitals with ER and mental health funding

South Muskoka Memorial Hospital, which was a beneficiary of Peter Gilgan’s generosity, will share his name with hospitals in the GTA. PHOTO Mark Clairmont

Peter Gilgan, the Muskoka cottager whose name shares equal billing over SMMH’s ER entrance, donated $60M this week for a new ER and mental health unit tower at St. Joseph’s Hospital in west Toronto on the Ontario lakeshore.

And today the province announced the Parkdale-born billionaire and Mattamy Homes owner’s name will also grace a new hospital opening in Mississauga. Ontario is investing more than $14 billion to build the new 2.8-million-square-foot Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital, tripling the size of the existing Mississauga Hospital to help provide health care to an estimated 2.2 million people, it says in a release Wednesday.

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