The flames are progressing too quickly. On Wednesday evening, August 16, residents of Yellowknife were ordered to leave one of the main cities in Canada’s Far North by the weekend, due to rapidly advancing wildfires, local authorities said.
“Unfortunately, the wildfire situation is getting worse with an inferno west of Yellowknife posing a real threat,” Northwest Territories Environment Minister Shane Thompson said in ordering the evacuation. by Friday at midday of the 20,000 residents of this city.
Nearly 168,000 people have had to be evacuated to Canada since the start of a fire season that is breaking all records and is currently overwhelming the Northwest Territories, a northern region twice the size of mainland France which counts currently 230 active fires. Separated by several hundred kilometers from each other, these villages are “particularly difficult” to evacuate by land, explained earlier this week Mike Westwick, of the territorial fire department, adding that a contingent of the Canadian army was deployed to facilitate air evacuations.
Faced with the advance of the fires, the local Minister of the Environment asked the population on Wednesday evening to leave Yellowknife by air or road. “The city is not in immediate danger…but without rain the blaze may hit the city’s surroundings this weekend,” Thompson told a news conference. “If you stay until the weekend, you risk endangering yourself and others,” he added.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday that the armed forces were still deployed to provide assistance to the people of the Northwest Territories. “We will continue to provide you with the necessary resources” and “provide all the assistance possible”, he wrote on the X network (ex-Twitter).
NWT residents: We’re here for you. We have mobilized members of the @CanadianForces and we will continue to provide you with the necessary resources. I spoke about this today with PM @CCochrane_NWT – and reiterated our commitment to provide all possible assistance.
Living in a municipality of some 2,250 people currently under evacuation orders, Jordan Evoy, 28, had hoped to leave his home by car to seek refuge in neighboring Alberta, but a major forest fire forced him to turn back on Monday. and flee by military aircraft. “I couldn’t see anything in front of me […] There was no network, so no way of knowing where I was, it was even more nerve-wracking,” he explains. Jordan Evoy worried that his truck’s tires would “melt” in the heat. “The highway was engulfed in flames, it was the scariest moment of my life,” he commented.
The neighboring province of British Columbia, also hard hit by forest fires, recorded a mercury above 40 degrees Celsius, a first this year in Canada, the Ministry of the Environment said on Tuesday. . The town of Lytton saw temperatures hit 41.4 degrees on Monday, two years after it was engulfed in flames in the days following an unprecedented “heat dome” with an all-time high of 49.6 degrees for the country.
Canada, which due to its geographical location is warming faster than the rest of the planet, has been confronted in recent years with extreme weather events whose intensity and frequency have been increased by global warming.