Huge fire at doorstep of Saskatchewan town
The fire has jumped highways, streams and even a bulldozed no man’s land slashed through the woods by firefighters. By Tuesday night, it surrounded the La Ronge airport on three sides.
“Oh man, the fire jumped so fast and so quick,” read an online update by Jack Charles, one of the emergency personnel on the scene.
As thousands of La Ronge evacuees across the central Prairies watch with anxious anticipation, the battle to save their town is reaching its final climax.
Walls of orange flame had been seen lapping at the chain link fences along the airport’s borders. Just to the north, ski trails and camp grounds have gone up in smoke. And the flames need only to advance a two-minute drive to the south before they would start tearing through subdivisions.
As La Ronge gets caught in the eye of one of the worst fires in Saskatchewan history, exhausted firefighters, overworked pilots and a deployment of Canadian soldiers are all that separates this remote community from becoming the next Slave Lake.
“Houses stand but still in a full swing battle out there,” wrote a firefighter from La Ronge in an update to friends and family.
Cheers and honks greeted soldiers as they streamed into Prince Albert in a long convoy of olive green pickup trucks, G wagons and armoured personnel carriers.
Like virtually every Saskatchewan city this week, Prince Albert is packed with evacuees from the north, many of whom were more than happy to turn out to greet the 1 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group as liberators.
“Help is on the way!” declared a Facebook post of the vehicles kicking up dust as they pulled into Prince Albert.
More than 500 soldiers, all of them from the Edmonton Garrison, had been called into service as muscle for the gruelling task of fighting fires with picks and shovels.
“Our soldiers, by virtue of their preparation for general war-fighting, are very well prepared for this,” Brigadier-General Wayne Eyre, commander of Joint Task Force West, assured reporters on Tuesday.
While Northern Saskatchewan is currently bearing the brunt of the 2015 fire season, it is just the beginning of a wave of wildfires that has already swept much of Western Canada. Vancouver, Victoria and communities throughout B.C. and the prairies remained shrouded in smoke Tuesday as fires tore through millions of hectares of forests.
La Ronge and surrounding communities have been turned into ghost towns after being subject to a mandatory evacuation order over the weekend.
The fear is that La Ronge could become the next Slave Lake. It was only four years ago that high winds pushed flames deep into the centre of the Alberta town, roaring over firebreaks with ease. Within hours, more than one third of the community was gone.