Wildfires are once again in the spotlight, ravaging vast stretches of central and western Canada. Hundreds of wildfires burning across the country, many of which are too remote or intense to control, forced tens of thousands to evacuate as smoke blanketed communities nationwide, drifted into US cities, and even reached Europe.
As climate patterns shift, northern parts of the country are becoming warmer and drier, turning once-resilient forests into tinderboxes. The result: longer, more severe wildfire seasons that break records not just in scale, but in the breadth of their consequences. While headlines focus on scorched homes and hazy skies, what often goes unnoticed are the less visible aftershocks that wildfires create – long after the flames are out.
According to Philip Mikitchook (pictured), senior risk engineer at HDI Global SE Canada, the damage doesn’t end with the burn. From evacuations to post-fire soil conditions that trigger floods and landslides, the ripple effects of wildfires are far more complex than most realize, he says.
Many companies operating in high-risk zones are already attuned to the threat and have implemented protective measures around their facilities. But as Mikitchook emphasizes, the real vulnerability often lies beyond the perimeter fence.
Wildfires don’t need to make direct contact with a building or piece of infrastructure to cause major disruption. A wildfire, he said, might block essential access roads, severing transportation and supply chains, or it might trigger evacuations that sideline entire workforces. In these cases, operations grind to a halt – not because of fire damage, but because of the logistical collapse that follows.
“They can be shut down by external factors, like air quality evacuations,” he said.
Even more worrying is what happens to the land itself after the flames die down. Mikitchook said that destruction of forest root systems means the ground becomes parched and brittle. With the roots gone, soil loses its structure and begins to repel water rather than absorb it.
This hydrophobic condition turns rainfall into a hazard of its own. Water races across the surface instead of soaking in, increasing the likelihood of erosion, landslides, and flash flooding.
“It’s like that poor plant at home that you haven’t watered for two weeks,” he said. “When you add a little bit of water, it all comes out the bottom. The same thing happens with the soil.”
These secondary hazards, he said, can be just as destructive as the initial fire as they can introduce a new wave of threats, often months or even years after the original blaze.
Awareness of wildfire risk is widespread within the insurance and risk management industries. Yet as Mikitchook points out, awareness alone doesn’t always translate into action. Many stakeholders, he said, recognize the growing threat, but the steps needed to reduce that threat often fall into grey zones of responsibility and political will.
One of the central challenges lies in forest management. Left unmanaged, dense and dry forests become a reservoir of fuel, increasing the chance and severity of wildfires.
From an insurance perspective, Mikitchook said that underwriters are not necessarily behind the curve. Risk models are evolving, and many insurers are taking proactive steps to understand and price wildfire exposure accurately. Still, he said that no system is perfect and cites California fires where the scale of destruction exceeded all expectations.
According to Mikitchook, the key to resilience lies in data – specifically, in climate risk reports that project environmental changes decades into the future.
Using advanced mapping tools, AI, and scientific models, these reports analyze how factors like temperature, humidity, and heat extremes are likely to evolve in five-year increments over the next century. The goal is not just to forecast risk, but to help companies fortify their sites with long-term climate conditions in mind.
This approach, he warned, often hinges on the ability of an organization to remember past disasters and take steps to avoid repeating them. Mikitchook noted that when a company has recently experienced a major loss, there's usually a surge in attention and investment in prevention. But when leadership changes or enough time passes, that urgency can fade.
Still, he said, most companies operating in exposed regions understand that they are at risk, and many have taken steps to develop emergency response plans.
“Can more be done to secure these kinds of facilities? Yes,” Mikitchook said. “But I think it might be a very big picture to do that – not necessarily from site to site, but more a large geographic area to large geographic area.”
