ENTWISTLE, CANADA (AFP) – Cooler temperatures and light rain brought relief that allowed some wildfire evacuees to return home in Canada’s Alberta province on Tuesday, but several blazes were still out of control and a coming sharp rise in the mercury could set back efforts to tame the fires.
Authorities have lifted evacuation orders for a handful of communities after beating back flames, but suffocating smoke still fills the air – carried by winds across the continent as far as the Arctic and the United States Atlantic coast.
The number of wildfires that forced 30,000 people to flee in the past four days has fallen from a peak of 110 to 81, with 24 still listed as out of control.
But officials warned that a return to hot and dry conditions was expected by tomorrow and would persist through the weekend.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith noted that 30,000 hectares in the province are usually consumed by wildfires each year. “We’ve already had 390,000 hectares burned. So it’s already 10 times the typical fire year and we’re really just getting started,” she told reporters.
“It’s an extraordinary (and) unprecedented event, which is I think what we have to be prepared for in future. At the moment, it’s all hands on deck,” she said, noting that more than 700 firefighters are currently deployed and a request has been made for another 1,100 reinforcements from the rest of the country.
Fire chief for the county west of Edmonton Brian Cornforth, said his crew of over 60 firefighters “are exhausted”. “We’ve been at this for over a week and this fire keeps (spreading) to new areas.”
He described how a grass fire in the area had spread across 90 kilometres (km) “within a few hours”.
“We need new resources and additional firefighters now,” he told AFP. “Over the next few days, we’re going to see it get drier and drier and hotter and hotter, and those two things work against us for firefighting.” Around the town of Entwistle, 120 km west of Edmonton, entire forests and grasslands were blackened and smoke billowed from the ground. A local cemetary appeared to have been spared, but its tombstones were covered in soot and ash.
Elsewhere, burnt-out trucks and collapsed buildings lined roads into the town, observed an AFP journalist. Cheryl Harris, 58, returned to find a massive pile of charred debris in place of what was once a thriving river tubing business.
“We had a bunch of rain two days ago and that helped settle things, and we’re getting a little bit of a sprinkle today, hopefully we’ll get the rain that they’re calling for, but we still need a lot (to douse) the wildfires,” she said.
“Today it’s cooled off enough that we can pick through and see what can be salvaged,” she said.
Surveying the damage, Harris told AFP: “It’s hard to see 16 years of work (destroyed),” pausing as she teared up.
