Thousands flee wildfire in Canada Evacuation orders issued in Washington state
Officials say 19,000 left Northwest Territories in less than 48 hours
VANCOUVER, British Columbia – The capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories was virtually deserted after nearly all the residents of the city of just over 20,000 fled as a huge wildfire burned nearby.
To the south, in British Columbia, thousands more people were told to leave their homes while firefighters battled a growing fire that set homes ablaze.
Officials in Northwest Territories said Friday evening that about 19,000 people had left Yellowknife in less than 48 hours, with about 15,000 driving out in convoys and 3,800 leaving on emergency flights.
“I described today as another marathon sprint,” Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty said. “It’s draining and, unfortunately, it’s not letting up yet.”
About 2,600 people were still in the city – 1,000 of them essential workers, authorities said.
Shane Thompson, the territory’s minister of environment and climate change, said the wildfire situation remained critical and the non-emergency personnel who stayed were endangering themselves and others. “Please get out now,” he said.
Streets were nearly empty and stores shuttered. “It’s a ghost town,” said Kieron Testart, who was going door to door in the nearby First Nation communities of Dettah and NDilo to check on people.
A grocery store and a pharmacy remained open Friday but were expected to close. The last gas station still operating shut down in the afternoon. One bar was still open, drawing exhausted workers at the end of long shifts.
“It’s kind of like having a pint at the end of the world,” Testart said.
Cooler temperatures and higher humidity helped firefighters keep the wildfire from advancing Friday, holding it 9 miles northwest of the city’s outskirts, fire information officer Mike Westwick said.
“For the first time in a while, we got a little bit of help from weather,” he said.
But he warned that emergency officials still fear weather conditions could change and propel the fire – one of hundreds raging in the territory – to the city limits.
Eleven air tankers bombed water onto the flames and another plane dropped fire retardant. A 6-mile fire line was dug, and firefighters deployed 12 miles of hose and a plethora of pumps in the fight to keep the fire at bay.
It is “the most extensive heavy water operation we’ve ever seen in the territory,” Westwick said.
The fire, caused by lightning more than a month ago, is about 644 square miles and “not going away anytime soon,” Westwick said. He said the blaze had jumped three different containment lines, fueled by dry weather and dense forests.
Hundreds of miles south of Yellowknife, homes burned in West Kelowna,
British Columbia, a city of about 38,000, after a wildfire grew “exponentially worse” than expected overnight, officials said.
Premier David Eby declared a state of emergency for the province because of the rapidly evolving wildfire situation.
“We are in for an extremely challenging situation in the days ahead,” Eby said at a news conference Friday evening.
He said the decree would give authorities a number of legal tools, including the power to prevent people from traveling into dangerous areas and ensure access to accommodations for evacuees and heavy equipment for fighting the fires.
Officials in West Kelowna already ordered people to evacuate 2,400 properties and alerted an additional 4,800 properties to be ready to leave. The BC Wildfire Service said the fire stretched over 26 square miles.
No casualties had been reported, but some first responders became trapped while rescuing people who failed to
Fast-moving wildfires raced through Washington state on Friday, burning some homes and prompting evacuation orders for thousands of people in small rural communities.
One of the largest blazes, the so-called Gray Fire near Spokane in eastern Washington, began around noon and a few hours later had surged through 4.7 square miles of grass, timber and wheat, pushed by 35-mph (56-kph) winds, according to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources.
Level 3, or “Go Now,” evacuations were issued for Medical Lake, a community of about 4,800 people and some homes and other buildings had burned, authorities said, although it wasn’t clear how many.
Evacuation orders also were issued for nearby Four Lakes, which has about 500 residents and a Level 2 evacuation alert, urging people to “Get Set” to evacuate, was issued Friday night for the city of Cheney, which has more than 13,000 residents. The alert included staff and students at Eastern Washington University, which is located in Cheney. evacuate, said Jason Brolund, chief of the West Kelowna fire department.
Bowinn Ma, the province’s minister of emergency management, said at a news briefing Friday afternoon that “we are still faced with great challenges.”
Canada has seen a record number of wildfires this year – contributing to choking smoke in parts of the United States – with more than 5,700 fires burning more than 53,000 square miles from one end of Canada to the other, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
As of Friday morning, more than 1,000 wildfires were burning across the country, over half of them out of control.
About 6,800 people in eight other communities in the Northwest Territories had already evacuated their homes, including the small community of Enterprise, which was largely destroyed.