Wildfires on Friday bore down on two Canadian cities, with firefighters in the west bracing for another “scary” night as stunned refugees from the far north began arriving at shelters after their entire city was evacuated.
The two fronts in British Columbia and the Northwest Territories are just the latest in a summer of devastating wildfires across the country that have forced tens of thousands from their homes and left millions of hectares scorched.
The blazes have caused “terrible loss,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters after meeting evacuees from Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, as they arrived in Edmonton, Alberta, hundreds of kilometers to the south with no idea when they would return home again.
Photo: Reuters
Meanwhile, British Columbia Premier David Eby declared a state of emergency in the province late on Friday.
The announcement came as the fire burning west of Kelowna, a town of 150,000 people in the Okanagan Valley, exploded a hundred fold in size to 6,800 hectares in the past day.
Officials described firefighters being forced to pull back and some becoming trapped behind lines while making “heroic efforts” to rescue residents.
Photo: AFP
“We fought hard last night to protect our community,” local fire chief Jason Brolund told a briefing. “A significant number of structures were lost,” he said, but no injuries or fatalities were reported.
“It was like 100 years of firefighting all at once, in one night,” he said, adding that he expected “another scary night tonight” under an eerie glow of the fires.
Thousands of households on Kelowna’s west side were ordered evacuated or told late on Thursday to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
“The situation is unpredictable right now and there are difficult days ahead,” Eby told a news conference.
In the far north, Yellowknife was a ghost town late on Friday after ordering its entire population to leave by the afternoon — the largest ever evacuation from the region.
Most of its 20,000 inhabitants left by road to the nearest evacuation center 1,150km away in Alberta, where several sites had been set up.
Almost 4,000 people flew out, officials said, with a pilot on one of the relief flights telling Canadian media that the lakeside city was “pretty empty.”
Yellowknife has not been abandoned: Crews remained to erect defenses as the flames approached, while water bombers have been seen and the Canadian military is also helping out.
Several towns and Indigenous communities had already been evacuated.
The evacuation from Yellowknife means half the population of the near-arctic territory has been displaced.
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