The Watch
LATITUDE
Editor’s Note: After 27 years of contributing to The PEG , writer Gail Helgason has retired. Our World Watch section was the grand finale of her freelance career. Despite our applause and demands for another encore or two, Gail has officially decided to leave the stage. And head to the cottage, no doubt. We miss her already. World Watch tracked everything from wearable electronics to self-driving cars, robot bees to 3D-printed houses, wacky and sustainable skyscrapers to marine electrical generation. The discovery of new minerals to the discovery of old civilizations. The digging of massive tunnels to the building of massive bridges. We’ve loved every bite-sized morsel of it and so have many PEG readers. Technology, of course, has marched ever onward during Gail’s tenure. She was writing for us when apps were made of paper (as was The PEG ) and the net was something you took fishing. She stuck in there, though, sharing her enthusiasm for each new scientific twist and turn that came the world’s way. Thank you, Gail, for your consistent, dependable, and just plain fun output. Another talented writer toiling behind the scenes for The PEG is Caitlin Crawshaw, our Buzz contributor. The Buzz was— past tense intentional—a feature about issues affecting and reflecting engineering and geoscience in Alberta. Along with Gail, we’re bidding farewell to The Buzz and World Watch . Both types of content, however, continue in the recurring section you’re reading now, which we’ve dubbed The Watch . We’re adding to the mix content related to the country and other provinces and territories. Caitlin is staying with us, too, and she’ll be our prime freelancer on the job. Who knows. Maybe she’ll stick around for 27 years.
PLANNING AGAINST THE WORST Strategic city planning could be the key to minimizing damage and destruction from future wildfires, like the infamous one that destroyed this neighbourhood in Fort McMurray in 2016.
CREATE MORE FIREBREAKS IN CITIES, U OF C RESEARCH SUGGESTS Engineering researchers at the University of Calgary say urban areas need wide-open spaces to help prevent wildfires from ravaging communities. The team used high spatial resolution satellite images to understand how civic design and planning affected wildfire movement through Fort McMur- ray in 2016 and Slave Lake in 2011. The resulting data show that the destruction of buildings was strongly related to how close trees and vegetation were to neighbourhoods. De- pending on forest density, even distances of 30 to 50 metres can allow fire to spread. The study includes recommendations to slow or stop fires, including the use of ring roads and large parking lots as firebreaks.
SUMMER 2018 PEG | 55
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