Energy and resources assets can be adapted to conditions their designers did not anticipate, but only where the original assumption is identified and re-tested rather than inherited.
The 2024 Jasper wildfire burned roughly 33,000 hectares, a modest footprint by recent Canadian standards, and produced $1.31 billion in insured losses. It is the second costliest fire event in Canadian history after Fort McMurray. The lesson operators took from it was not that fires are getting bigger. It is that a fire does not need to be big to reach something that matters.
That is the shape of the problem across this sector. Mines, dams, transmission corridors and processing facilities sit on the land for decades, and they were designed against ground conditions, fire regimes and storm patterns that were treated as fixed. Most of those assumptions were reasonable when they were made. Several are no longer true, and almost none of them are written down anywhere a current operator would find them.
It is arriving alongside capital rather than instead of it. In May 2026 the federal government committed more than $55 million across two Arctic projects, including up to $50 million toward the Grays Bay Road and Port in Nunavut. Behind that sits the Critical Minerals Infrastructure Fund at up to $1.5 billion, covering up to 75% of eligible costs for Arctic, northern and Indigenous-led work. More mines, roads and camps are being sited in permafrost terrain now than at almost any point in recent history, in the same years permafrost became measurably less predictable to build on.
Two versions of it follow in this issue. Ground assumed to stay frozen, in a region where the assumption is now measurably wrong. Fire return intervals assumed to hold, on assets sited when they did. Different practices, different failure modes, same root cause: a number nobody re-read.
The practical instruction is narrow, and it costs nothing to start. For any asset in your portfolio, find the design basis document and identify the environmental assumption it was built on: the return period, the fire interval, the ground temperature, the design storm. Then check that number against the last ten years of record. Most operators have never done this, not through negligence but because the assumption is buried in an appendix nobody has opened since commissioning. The exercise is cheap and it tells you which assets are exposed before anything is spent on them.
The assets that fail first are rarely the ones under the most stress. They are the ones whose design assumption drifted furthest from reality without anyone re-reading it.
PRI works across environmental, geotechnical and structural practices on assets in changing conditions. Contact the practice to discuss a portfolio review.
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Arash Yazdani, CED, FEC, QP, P.Eng.
Chief Technical Officer
arash.yazdani@priengineering.com