Residents in the capital of the Northwest Territories in Canada have been ordered to leave their city as wildfires threaten to reach the remote community by the weekend, Ednews informs referring to The Globe and Mail.
Premier Caroline Cochrane urged Yellowknife’s 20,000 residents to obey the evacuation order, which demands citizens be out of the city by Friday at noon. The order, issued Wednesday evening, also applies to Ndılǫ, Dettah and Ingraham Trail.
“I know we are all tired of the word ‘unprecedented’ but there’s no other way to describe the situation in the Northwest Territories,” she said in an update.
Flames are 17 kilometers from Yellowknife’s municipal boundary and officials said fire will reach the outskirts of the city by Saturday and the Ingraham Trail by Friday unless it rains. Yellowknife is on the north shore of Great Slave Lake, 1,450 kilometers north of Edmonton. Geography, coupled with a plethora of forest fires along the escape route, will complicate the evacuation process.
There are roughly 240 fires burning across the territory and thousands of people have already been displaced, with many airlifted to Alberta. More than 2.1 million hectares of land has been destroyed by wildfires in NWT, about four times the size of Prince Edward Island, so far this year. Evacuations have been ordered for Fort Smith and Jean Marie River, the K’atl’odeeche First Nation and some cabin communities. The fires have torn through homes and other structures, closed highways and upended wireless telecommunications in certain areas – leaving residents essentially in the dark for emergency information.
