Ash falling from the sky. Homes smelling like campfires from the inside. A town called Collins evacuated by boat as flames closed in. This is what forest fire season actually looked like on the ground this year, told through the voices of the people who lived through it.

The reporting pulls together on-the-ground accounts from across Ontario, including firsthand descriptions from Thunder Bay of skies turning burnt orange by mid-afternoon and temperatures swinging by ten degrees once the smoke rolled in at night. It also tracks the federal response as Ontario requested outside help fighting fires that outpaced the crews available to handle them.

Then the numbers get stranger. This year's national fire count sits at a fraction of where it stood in 2011, and even further below decades before that. What that gap actually means, and why the smoke has felt this much worse anyway, gets laid out plainly.

Topics: forest fires Canada, wildfire smoke, Thunder Bay, Ontario wildfires, wildfire statistics

Originally aired on 2026-07-16