“The situation is unpredictable at the present time and difficult days await us,” said the province’s chief minister (West), David Abe, on Friday evening.
And in the north, the authorities gave the twenty thousand residents of the city of Yellowknife until Friday noon to leave, in a race against time complicated by the isolation of the capital of the Canadian Northwest Territories.
Some of the evacuees arrived Friday evening at Calgary airport carrying small bags, according to an AFP journalist.
“I feel lost, I have no idea what will happen now,” said Byron Garrison, a 27-year-old construction worker who arrived with his girlfriend and one of his companions.
The arrivals from the Canadian north are received in a small hall to register them and distribute them to hotels, and they are given fruit, cake and water, and food is also provided for the pets that some of them brought.
“The government told us to leave, so my wife and I brought some clothes and Rosie (their dog),” said Richard Manobag, 53, an employee of a Yellowknife cafe.
“I am sad, I think of all my belongings in my house and I don’t know what will happen. This is my only home,” he added.
Like many, he hopes to only stay in Calgary for “three or four days”.
Army mobilization
One of the pilots in charge of the evacuations, Chad Beloit, told CBC that Yellowknife, where the army was mobilized, was “nearly empty.”
Most of the residents were transported by land, while about 4,000 people chose to leave by air.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited Edmonton on Friday evening, about 1,000 km from Yellowknife, and met there arrivals from the north who were taken to a reception center.
“We will all get out of this incredibly difficult summer together,” he told reporters.
Trudeau spoke of an “uncertain and terrifying phase” at a time when more than a thousand fires are currently ravaging the country from east to west, more than 230 of them burning in the Northwest Territories and more than 370 of them in British Columbia.
“Nature was the strongest”
The fires affect, in particular, Six Kelowna (more than 30,000 people), where a “large number” of homes burned, according to the authorities, and an evacuation order was issued for some areas.
The fire swept 6,800 hectares of land within 24 hours in this sector, where about 2,500 buildings were evacuated, and another 5,000 buildings are likely to be evacuated.
The situation is also critical in the city of Kelowna (about 150,000 people) on the opposite bank of Okanagan Lake, and the airspace of the region was closed to contribute to efforts to combat the fire by planes.
The West Kelowna fire chief admitted Friday that the night before was “probably one of the most intense of my career.”
“We fought the equivalent of a hundred years of fires, all in one night,” Jason Prolund told reporters.
“We made every effort to mitigate the fire, but in the end it was nature who was the strongest,” said Loyal Wooldridge, a local official in Kelowna.
This year, Canada is witnessing the wildest wildfire season ever, causing the evacuation of 168,000 Canadians across the country and destroying 14 million hectares of land, double the previous record set in 1989.
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2023-08-19 07:46:18
