2023-08-20 03:01:00
Tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated across northern and western Canada, where firefighters continued Saturday to battle wildfires of unusual intensity.
“This is the first time that something like this, of this magnitude, has happened in the region,” Tony Whitford, 82, told AFP.
This neighbor and his family were evacuated on Thursday from Yewllownife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, to the city of Calgary, in Alberta, about 1,750 km to the south.
“At least 19,000 people have been evacuated from Yellowknife in the last 48 hours,” nearly the entire city, Shane Thompson, environment minister for the Northwest Territories, said Friday night.
Some 15,000 people fled by road and 3,800 were evacuated by air, while at least 300 firefighters were mobilized to fight the flames, one of the biggest efforts this isolated region of Canada’s Far North has ever known, it added.
“It was really horrible. I couldn’t believe it,” said Martha Kanatsiak, a 59-year-old Yellowknife resident who has lived there for more than 20 years and arrived in Calgary late Friday.
“I’m sad, depressed and worried. I’ve never seen anything like this,” said the Inuit retiree, who carried just a couple of bags with her. “I hope it ends soon, because it’s very hard.”
At least 40 flights with 3,500 passengers on board from Yellowknife have landed in Calgary, and the city has made 495 hotel rooms available for evacuees, authorities said.
“I feel lost, I have no idea what’s going to happen now,” said Byron Garrison, a 27-year-old construction worker accompanied by his girlfriend and a friend, all three visibly scared.
The refugees from the Far North were received in a small room to be registered and distributed among the hotels. Fruit, biscuits and water were distributed to them, as verified by an AFP journalist.
The outbreaks were 15 km from Yellownife on Saturday, but winds blowing from the northwest could carry the flames as far as the city limits, according to Canadian authorities.
British Columbia is also facing fires and had to declare a state of emergency on Friday. On Saturday, he ordered some 30,000 people to leave.
“The numbers change all the time, but as of now we are hovering around 30,000 people on evacuation order and another 36,000 on evacuation alert,” Bowinn Ma, the province’s minister in charge of crisis management, told a press briefing. .
“We cannot stress enough how important it is to follow evacuation orders when they are issued,” Ma said.
Prime Minister David Eby gave slightly different figures for the number of evacuees across the province: 35,000 people with orders to evacuate and another 30,000 preparing to flee if necessary.
Eby and Ma also announced an emergency order to stop non-essential visitors to the area.
Thick smoke engulfed the city of Kelowna, some 600 km west of Calgary, which has about 150,000 inhabitants, according to AFP journalists.
The local campus of the University of British Columbia, which is home to more than 11,000 students, received evacuation orders late Friday and the region’s airspace was closed to aid aircraft efforts to fight the fires.
The situation is also critical on the other side of Lake Okanagan, in West Kelowna (more than 30,000 inhabitants), where “a significant number” of houses burned, according to authorities.
The luxury Lake Okanagan Resort hotel, which in the past housed high-level political leaders such as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is among the buildings ravaged by flames, according to images circulating in the local press.
Several thousand evacuations also took place in the state of Washington, in the United States, neighboring British Columbia, where a fire broke out on Friday near the city of Spokane, according to local press. Authorities have confirmed one death.
During a trip to a reception center for evacuees from the north in Edmonton on Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of “terrifying and uncertain times” as more than a thousand fires ravage the country from east to west, including more than 230 in the Northwest Territories and more than 370 in British Columbia.
Canada has faced in recent years extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency are increased by global warming.
The country is experiencing a record wildfire season this year: 168,000 Canadians have been evacuated and 14 million hectares, an area similar to that of Greece, have burned, double the last record, dating from 1989.
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