‘I left everything in that house,’ mom says

• As Patricia Roberts pushed her baby in her stroller and tried to keep her other toddler amused, she reflected on their home, where she lovingly decorated her daughters’ bedrooms in Disney themes — now lost to the fires ravaging Saskatchewan’s north.

“I had that house for almost two years. Gone,” she said in an interview. Roberts is among some 150 evacuees who are staying in University of Regina residences. A total of 1,100 evacuees are in Regina.

Roberts said her partner has remained behind in Hall Lake, where their home was located, to fight the fires. It was through him she learned over the weekend that their three-bedroom house was gone.

“I left everything in that house,” she said.

After a series of bus rides, she and her daughters arrived in the city a couple days ago when thick smoke was blanketing her home community.

Her family advised her to leave for the sake of her young children, Jazmine, just age one, and Jade, age three. “They just said to keep my daughters safe,” she said.

The Red Cross said Sunday it had assisted some 6,650 people displaced by the northern fires, including 1,050 who left the La Ronge area Saturday. Of those, 685 went to shelters in Cold Lake, Alta., 141 to Saskatoon, and 365 made their own arrangements.

“It is absolutely the largest evacuation that we’ve experienced in Saskatchewan,” said Cindy Fuchs, provincial director for the Red Cross. The registered evacuees come from 45 communities, and most are being housed in Regina, Saskatoon and Prince Albert.

An evacuee who arrived in Regina from the La Ronge area last week, 72-year-old Sam Ross explained that this was his first time in the province’s capital city. While enjoying his strolls around the U of R campus, his mind wasn’t far from home.

“I’m sure my cabin has burned down,” he said, adding that he built the log cabin several decades ago to suit his lifestyle as a trapper but more recently moved in with family on the La Ronge First Nation.

“I’m a bush Indian. I couldn’t get used to the city,” said Ross. He and a fellow evacuee chuckled about the size of the urban jackrabbits roaming the university campus as compared to the smaller bush bunnies of the north — “enough to feed three instead of just one.”