Telegraph Creek residents returning

The 300 residents of Telegraph Creek, a small reserve up north ravaged by this summer’s record-breaking forest fires, will return beginning this month, more than three months after they were evacuated.

And they may not recognize the place they were forced to flee in early August.

The 120,000-hectare blaze raced through the middle of the reserve, which is east of Juneau, Alaska, said Feddie Louie, director of the emergency operations centre.

“It didn’t go around the community, it went right through the community,” she said. “A lot of the hills are bare, the homes won’t be the same because they have to be cleaned and repainted, everything will look different. There is nothing that is going to look the same about Telegraph Creek.”

“All the rubble and the burnt trees are gone, they did some cleaning and landscaping, it’s so wide open now,” said council member Richard “Rocky” Jackson by phone from the band’s temporary office in Dease Lake.

Across the regional district, 169 structures were lost to the flames, 44 of them homes, 21 of them on the reserve, said Louie. The displaced residents have been staying in hotels and other temporary lodgings in Dease Lake and Terrace.

On Nov. 15, Louie will request the evacuation order, in place since early August, be lifted and residents will begin returning the next day, as each of the homes is cleaned, with everyone back in place the week before Christmas.

Those whose houses were destroyed will move for the winter into a temporary village with eight modular homes and eight double-wide or single trailer homes. Three older residents will be housed in the elders’ complex.