The race to save Yellowknife from Canada's raging wildfires

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When Jay Bulckaert answered the phone, he was clearing brush at Kam Lake to prevent it from burning, just outside Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories. Just a few kilometers away, a huge wildfire stalked the city, threatening to get closer as the winds changed. Thousands of people have left Yellowknife since an evacuation order was announced last Wednesday night. But not Bulckaert, nor the other volunteers who showed up on Friday morning of that same week to do everything they could to prevent the fire from devastating the city of 20,000 people. “We all got to work,” he commented.

They divided up the tasks as soon as they met that day. From adm Phone Number List inistrative work, driving buses and tractors, operating chainsaws, feeding the brigade... everyone contributed something. “Right now we clear the undergrowth. Moving sprinklers will probably be next. We are nothing more than a group of locals who showed up here and volunteered. We will do everything they ask of us,” declared Bulckaert, who normally works as a film director.

Bulckaert was not planning to leave, and would not do so until the authorities forced him to. It was part of Yellowknife's last line of defense. "This is my city. I will be here until the bitter end,” he shared.

Yellowknife, the city threatened by forest fires
Yellowknife is in the southern part of the Northwest Territories, on the shores of the Great Slave Lake, the deepest in North America and the tenth largest in the world. It is named after the inhabitants of the “ Dene First Nation”. First Nation ,” a group of indigenous people who together make up 28% of the region's population.

The city is surrounded by boreal forest, the largest intact forest ecosystem in the world, stretching from the tip of Newfoundland and Labrador in the east to Alaska in the west. In the portion located within the Northwest Territories, a coniferous stand of spruce, pine, and other native plants is home to hundreds of species of wildlife, including bears, bison, beavers, wolves, crows, and porcupines. At night, it is not uncommon to see the Northern Lights dancing above the treetops.

Two million hectares, more than 13,000 square kilometers (8,200 square miles) of this pristine wilderness have burned since May, in what is already the worst year on record for wildfires in all of Canada . More than 1,000 forest fires are currently burning across the country. This season a total of 5,767 have been counted. Together, they have burned 14 million hectares, which is roughly equivalent to the size of the US state of Alabama or the entire area of ​​Greece.

In the Northwest Territories alone there were 236 active fires last Saturday. The one closest to Yellowknife, the territory's only real city, is called ZF015. That fire, along with another one closer to Ingraham Trail, a local highway, “surrounded” the city in flames, said Mike Westwick, information officer for the area. Across the North Slave region, thousands of people were forced to leave their homes and move to evacuation centers, rooms free of unknown people and camping trailers in Alberta, the province closest to the south of the territory.



On the phone from a rest area in Grand Prairie, Alberta, nearly 1,200 kilometers from Yellowknife, Naledi Ndlovu, a recent high school graduate, describes her family's trip out of the city.

On Wednesday night, they left in a three-car convoy, just before a formal evacuation was ordered. Ndlovu says smoke and fire covered the edges of Highway 3, the only way out of the city. Some frantic wild animals, including bears, were running alongside the road, while others lay dead on the shore, having failed to escape.

Ndlovu's father held the steering wheel as the sun set and the sky darkened. The highway was jammed with frightened and frustrated drivers weaving in exhaustion through an endless haze of smoke. “There came a time when there was so much that we couldn't see the cars in front of us,” says Ndlovu. “People panicked during that journey. “I was trying to get to the safety zone as quickly as possible, overtaking the others at full speed.”

Along the way, the family's Toyota Tundra was hit from behind, and it wasn't the only accident, as people rushed to pass others on the road. Then he blew out a tire. When they went out to check the truck, they discovered that the four rubber tires had been deformed by the heat of the road.

Ndlovu's family would have to get a new set before continuing to Calgary, which represented another seven hours of travel south.