Canada. Thousands of people ordered to flee the wildfires raging in Canada’s far north crowded into a local airport Thursday to board evacuation flights as a long line of cars headed south on the only road open to safety.
Wednesday night’s order to evacuate Yellowknife, one of the largest cities in the Northwest Territories, marked the latest chapter in a terrible summer of fires in Canada, with tens of thousands of people forced to flee their homes and vast expanses. of burned land.
“We are all tired of the term ‘unprecedented’ but there is no other way to describe this situation,” Regional Prime Minister Caroline Cochrane said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
As of Thursday morning, more than 1,000 wildfires were burning, including some 230 in the Northwest Territories.
More than 20,000 residents of Yellowknife, the regional capital, have until noon Friday to leave by road or on commercial and military flights.
The mayor of that city, Rebecca Alty, warned drivers that the flames border the few roads that cross this vast territory and that they would find visibility limited by smoke.
Images shared on social networks and on Canadian television showed large tracts of blackened forests. On cars and trucks that managed to get out before roads became impassable, headlights melted and paint peeled off the vehicles.
“It took my sister five hours” to go 100 kilometers, Maggie Noble told the X network of the slow escape from Yellowknife in the dark.
The city declared an emergency earlier this week, and it soon spread throughout the Northern Territory, with firefighters forced to withdraw in some areas.
“Unfortunately, our bushfire situation has worsened with a fire burning to the west of Yellowknife now posing a real threat to the town,” Northwest Territories Environment Minister Shane Thompson told reporters. Wednesday night.
“Without rain, it is possible that (the fire) will reach the outskirts of the city by the weekend.”
historic evacuation
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Ottawa would “help out however it can.”
Several military planes were sent with more than 120 soldiers to help fight the flames.
In what had already been declared the largest evacuation in the history of the Northwest Territories, the emptying of Yellowknife now means that half the population of the Near-Arctic Territory will soon be displaced.
On Monday, the Canadian military began airlifting residents of the region’s smaller communities to safety after roads caught fire.
Separated by several hundred kilometers, most of the territory’s towns are difficult to evacuate by land, authorities said.
This season, megafires have spread across Canada with remarkable intensity, forcing 168,000 people to flee their homes and burning 13.5 million hectares, almost double the area of the last record of 7.3 million hectares, according to the Canadian Interagency Wildland Fire Centre.
Four people have died in the fires this year.
