Wildfires: Northern Canada’s Largest City Evacuated

Forest fires are raging across the country. Result ? Residents of Yellowknife were ordered on Wednesday evening to evacuate the main city in Canada’s far north by air or land by the weekend, local officials said.

“Unfortunately, the wildfire situation is deteriorating as the hell west of Yellowknife poses a real threat,” Northwest Territories Environment Minister Shane Thompson said as he ordered the evacuation, “there are 20,000 residents of this city on Friday at noon.

“If you stay, you risk putting yourself in danger”

“The city is not in imminent danger (…), but without rain, flames could engulf the city’s surroundings this weekend,” Thompson said at a press conference. Before adding: “If you stay until the weekend, you risk putting yourself in danger and putting others in danger. »

These villages, separated by several hundred kilometers from each other, are “particularly difficult” to evacuate by land, Mike Westwick of the Territorial Fire Department explained earlier this week, specifying that a Canadian Army contingent was deployed to facilitate air evacuation.

168 thousand people were evacuated in the country.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday that the military is still deployed to help the people of the Northwest Territories. “We will continue to provide you with the necessary resources” and “provide all possible assistance,” he said. writes to network Xnew name for Twitter.

The neighboring province of British Columbia, also hard hit by wildfires, recorded a mercury column above the 40-degree mark for the first time this year in Canada, the Environment Department told AFP on Tuesday. In that province, the city of Lytton reached 41.4 degrees on Monday, two years after it was engulfed in flames in days following an unprecedented “heat dome” of a record high of 49.6 degrees for the country.

Nearly 168,000 people have had to be evacuated to Canada since the start of a record-breaking fire season that now covers the Northwest Territories, a northern region twice the size of mainland France that currently has 230 active fires.