Tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated to northern and western Canada, where firefighters continued Saturday to fight fires of rare intensity.
“It’s the first time something like this, of this magnitude, has happened in the region,” Tony Whitford, 82, told AFP on Saturday. He and his family were evacuated Thursday from Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories surrounded by fires for several days, to the city of Calgary in Alberta, some 1,750 km to the south.
At least 19,000 people have been evacuated from Yellowknife in the past 48 hours, almost the entire city, Shane Thompson, Minister of Environment for the Northwest Territories, said Friday evening.
15,000 people fled by road, 3,800 were evacuated by air while at least 300 firefighters were mobilized to fight the flames, he added, one of the most important devices that has known this very isolated region of the Canadian Far North.
“It was really awful. I couldn’t believe it,” said Martha Kanatsiak, 59, a resident of Yellowknife for more than 20 years who arrived in Calgary late Friday.
“I’m fine but I’m sad, depressed and worried. I’ve never seen anything like it,” added the Inuit retiree, who only brought two small bags with her. “I hope it will end quickly because it is very hard”.
At least 40 flights carrying some 3,500 passengers from Yellowknife have landed in Calgary, and the city has made 495 hotel rooms available for evacuees, authorities said.
Refugees from the Far North were received in a small room to be registered and distributed to hotels. Fruit, biscuits and water were made available to them, noted an AFP journalist.
The fires were located 15 km from Yellowknife on Saturday but northwest winds could push the flames near the city limits, according to Canadian authorities.
British Columbia, also facing blazes, had to declare a state of emergency on Friday.
Thick smoke enveloped the city of Kelowna, nearly 600 km west of Calgary, which has about 150,000 inhabitants, according to AFP journalists.
The local University of British Columbia campus, which hosts more than 11,000 students, was placed under evacuation orders on Friday evening and the area’s airspace was closed to aid the efforts of the planes to Fight against 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 down, according to authorities.
The luxury hotel Lake Okanagan Resort, which in the past has hosted senior politicians such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is among the buildings ravaged by the flames, as shown by images circulating in the local press.
“Almost 15,000 people have been placed under evacuation orders” across British Columbia, and some 20,000 people must be ready to evacuate at any time, Bowinn Ma, Minister in charge of crisis management for the province at a press conference.
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 Friday to a reception center for evacuees from the North in Edmonton, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke of “uncertain and frightening times” as more than a thousand fires currently ravage the country of east to west, including over 230 in the Northwest Territories and over 370 in British Columbia.
Canada has been confronted in recent years with extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency are increased by global warming.
The country is experiencing a record-breaking wildfire season this year: 168,000 Canadians have been evacuated across the country and 14 million hectares – about the size of Greece – have burned, double the last record. from 1989.
19/08/2023 19:43:25 – Kelowna (Canada) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
