Canadian Forest Fire: 20,000 Yellowknife Residents Evacuated

Efforts to extinguish land fires in Canada. (Twitter/@NWTFire)

JAKARTA - Canadian firefighters on Thursday struggled to prevent a forest fire from reaching the northern city of Yellowknife, as the government announced the evacuation of all residents with a deadline until this afternoon Friday.

Water bombers flew low over Yellowknife, as thick smoke enveloped the capital of the Northwest Territory. Officials said the slow-moving fire was now 15 km (10 miles) northwest of the city and could reach the suburbs by Saturday if there were no rain.

"Very difficult days ahead - with two days of northwest to west-northwest winds Friday and Saturday, which will push the fire towards Yellowknife," the territorial fire service said in a statement on Facebook, citing Reuters, August 18.

Meanwhile in the Pacific province of British Columbia, which has experienced an unusually severe fire this year, officials are warning residents to be prepared for extreme fire conditions.

"This weather event is potentially the most challenging of the 24 to 48 hours of summer from a fire perspective," fire service director Cliff Chapman told reporters.

"We expect significant growth and we expect our resources to be challenged from north to south," he continued.

In Yellowknife, hundreds of people lined up outside a local high school, waiting to be taken to the airport for evacuation. There are a total of five evacuation flights planned to the neighboring province of Alberta on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau convened an Incident Response Group meeting to discuss the fires on Thursday, made up of senior officials and ministers who meet in the event of a crisis.

Secretary of Defense Bill Blair, speaking to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) after the meeting, said the federal government was monitoring evacuations closely and prepared to quickly transport residents if land lines were cut.

This is Canada's worst fire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change is exacerbating the problem of forest fires.

Drought has been a factor in the number and intensity of fires this year, officials said, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Most of Canada has experienced abnormally dry conditions.

Territorial Environment Minister Shane Thompson said an evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

"The urgency is, the fire is changing drastically... the conditions are in our favor at the moment, but that will change on Saturday," he told CBC.

In total, about 65 percent of the Territories population of 46,000 people will be evacuated, he said.

Separately, Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty said special teams were felling trees near the town in an effort to prevent the fire from spreading. They also plan to use flame retardants while making sure the sprinkler system is working, he told CBC.

Note that the Northwest Territory has limited infrastructure and there is only one two-lane road from Yellowknife to the province of Alberta in the south.

Alberta itself has set up three official refugee holding centers, for those going by road but the nearest one is more than 1,100 km (680 miles) from Yellowknife.

Some of the evacuees will be flown to Calgary, in Alberta. Iain Bushell, Calgary's director of emergency management, said the city can house and feed 5,000 people.

"We are ready to accommodate them and assist them as long as they need," he told a televised news conference.

It is known, the deadline for residents to leave Yellowknife is Friday afternoon local time.

So far about 134,000 square km (52,000 square miles) of land in Canada has been scorched, more than six times the 10-year average. Nearly 200,000 people have been forced to flee at some point this season.

"The county has never seen anything like this before in terms of fires ... this is an unimaginable situation for a lot of people," Mike Westwick, the territory's fire information officer, told CBC.

Since 2009, Canada has spent more money fighting and suppressing forest fires than it has on maintaining its firefighting personnel and programs.