It was never in doubt: They knew they would return
Sitting in the parking lot of an Edmonton Walmart, her family’s home in flames 400 kilometres away down a jammed highway, it all caught up with Gail Hanifan.
Instead of going into the store for supplies, she was frozen.
“I just said, ‘What am I going to get?’ ” she recalls.
“I knew in my heart that we had nothing.”
It’s been one year since a runaway wildfire changed course and engulfed the northern Alberta city of Fort McMurray, forcing the evacuation of almost 90,000 people and causing more damage than any other disaster in Canadian history.
While stories abound of people choosing not to go back, Gail Hanifan and her family remain committed to the town they say is unlike anywhere else.
Originally from New Brunswick, Gail and her husband, Rodney, first moved west for the jobs almost 20 years ago. They went back east once, but returned for good because of what they say is an unusually hard-working, family-oriented community.
“I have so much love for this place — it changed my life like no other,” Gail says, recounting the events of last May from their new rental home in the city they were once forced to flee.
Their two kids, 15 and 12, were born in Fort McMurray, and she credits the boomtown with making them a family.
Waiting out the evacuation, first in an Edmonton hotel, then in a borrowed camper, Rodney says they never talked about whether or not they’d come back. It was just a fact.
They stress they are among the lucky ones. Their kids were safe, and they were able to grab their two small dogs before running out the door. But they lost almost everything in their house.
Gail’s hunch that it was all gone was confirmed when a pilot friend snapped pictures of where their house once stood. The only things visible were iron skeletons of their cars sticking out of a pile of ash.
A month later, the family headed back north, and eventually found a rental home. They had always been renters, and in hindsight consider themselves lucky they aren’t fighting with insurance companies like so many of their neighbours.
They also quickly got to work replacing what they could, from plates and dishes to a leafy houseplant. But the irreplaceable things — their wedding video, the letter Gail wrote for her daughter when she was a baby, or the video diary she made for her son — are gone.
“Those things I grieved the most for,” she says. Luck has given them a hand, though. When they were first married, Rodney bought a painting for Gail, of a view of a beach, looking out a window. It was one of the lost things that made her sad, so one day she did a quick Kijiji search — and an identical print popped up.
She tracked down the seller, and now it hangs in their kitchen.
And the family is now looking to buy a home.
“There’s not many days that you don’t think about what happened,” says Rodney, “but it doesn’t rule your life, it doesn’t shape who you are.”