Fire's rapid spread takes residents, officials by surprise

Elise Stolte and Ben Gelinas, edmontonjournal.com 


Originally published on May 17, 2011.


When the wind changed, everything changed.

As a forest fire burned southeast of Slave Lake on Sunday morning, Farron Gillespie decided to take his kids swimming.

On the radio, town officials said there was no need to evacuate.

Then the wind picked up and the fire jumped two highways, destroyed a truck stop and threw sparks onto downtown roofs.

When Gillespie got home, the smoke was so thick he had trouble breathing.

His truck wouldn't start. A neighbour ran down the block to boost it. The tank was empty. He crossed his fingers and prayed the single jerry can of gas he saved for the lawn mower would be enough to get his family to Athabasca.

Bushes in the backyard were already burning as he and his wife, Melissa Chisaakay, sped away, their one-year-old on her lap.

As they drove, officials still weren't calling for an evacuation.

"That was the stupidest thing we ever heard," Gillespie said Monday, shaking his head.

"Thank God we didn't listen."

The fire turned so quickly Sunday that thousands were stranded and stuck in traffic as they searched the town for gas. Many tried driving north to Wabasca or west on Highway 2 but were turned back by road closures.

Others hunkered down in campers beside the roads leading out of town, waiting for them to open.

"Everything happened so fast," said Keyki Anderson, who was cooking dinner when the smoke suddenly got thick. "All of a sudden we saw flames over the trees."

She and her family tried the road to Wabasca, then took shelter on a gravel pad at a construction site west of town. They could hear explosions as buildings and gas stations in town went up.

"You'd just hear a pop in the background. Then you'd see a big cloud of black smoke," Anderson said. "Then 30 seconds to a minute later, all of a sudden a big strong gust of wind would come. It was so strong you would have to turn your face away so you didn't get hit from the dirt. There was ash everywhere."

"It was so smoky, it was hard to breathe. It looked like hell."

After several hours, emergency crews found the family and told them to move to the Walmart parking lot on the west side of town, where the air was better.

When the house behind theirs started on fire, Jolene Cardinal's family of 11 fled in a Jeep, each with just one bag of clothes.

They had only half a tank of gas, not enough to get to Athabasca, so they drove around the burning town searching for more.

The radio stopped working, so they gleaned information by eavesdropping on a portable police scanner and checking Facebook pages on their phones. At about 9: 30 p.m., the police switched to another channel and they lost even that source of information.

Another evacuee, a 16-year-old who would only give her first name, Cher, said the trailer park where she lived on the south side of town was the first to be hit by flames.

She and her boyfriend fled the neighbourhood on bicycles. He had to pull her along as she struggled to pedal with a sprained ankle.

Later, they sat at Walmart as buildings went up in flames.

"There were gas stations going up left and right. It seems so fake, but it was real," she said.

"They were telling Slave Lake not to evacuate, but the houses were already burning. It hurt, watching our town getting eaten up so fast."

Eventually Highway 2 east to Athabasca opened. Cardinal and her family gathered at the local college, hoping someone would know where to get gas. Even there, houses were burning down the block. They could still hear explosions.

"We could hear animals, coyotes and wolves. They were just screeching, yelping," Cardinal said. "It was pitch black, you couldn't see anything."

"Nothing but red. It was scary," said her friend, Vincent Auger.

The pair caught a bus at about 11: 30 p.m., which they thought would take them to Athabasca, where they planned to meet the rest of their families.

Then the bus rolled right past the Athabasca exit and headed for Westlock. Athabasca was too full.

They reached Westlock at about 5 a.m., but by then the driver had been rerouted again to Edmonton. "It just all happened to fast. I feel lost, misplaced," said Auger, 16. "They can't bring our town back."

Auger and Cardinal were among the first to arrive at the Edmonton evacuation centre at Northlands Expo Centre, where staff set up more than 200 cots overnight Sunday.

At a news conference there Monday morning, Employment Minister Thomas Lukaszuk said the chaos happened because firefighters had to first focus on people in imminent danger.

Fire crews should be commended, he said. "We have an entire city burning, and to have managed to evacuate that many people over such a short period of time without any loss of life is simply incredible."

Martha Urquhart never heard an evacuation order. The single mother and her three teenagers lost power as windswept flames burned a path toward their home, in a southeast neighbourhood that would be hardest hit by the fire.

They couldn't listen to the radio for updates. Their laptop, running on a battery with a portable Internet stick, struggled to connect, the Internet signal disrupted by a barrier of thick red smoke overhead.

At first the family thought to wait it out. Before the lines went down, the news said nothing about an evacuation.

"The smoke outside the house was getting so thick that we could no longer see across the street," said Urquhart's 19-year-old daughter, Tessa Simpson. "The sun was just glowing red and it felt like we were in the middle of a movie or something."

Without official word, the family decided on their own that it was time to leave. Most of their neighbours had already fled and Urquhart had heard many residents were heading to the Canadian Tire parking lot on the outskirts of town.

She had her kids each fill a bag with essentials -a change of clothes and something important to them.

Urquhart saved a bracelet with charms she collected on travels to Hawaii, London and Israel.

Tessa packed prayer books and stuffed animals she'd kept from when she was a baby.

As they packed their car, the family held wet cloths over their mouths to keep out the smoke.

Their eyes burned. "When the wind blew, you could feel the heat from the fire," Tessa said.

"The winds were just so strong, they were picking up that fire and just throwing it everywhere. A few little black pieces of charred something started flying across our front lawn."

They left their street and met a line of cars.

"It was a two-lane road, but everyone was going one direction," Urquhart said.

They met others in the Canadian Tire lot and were told they didn't have to evacuate. They hung out in the lot as smoke billowed in the distance.

Someone in the lot had a police scanner and people gathered around it, listening for updates.

"That's when we started realizing that the fire was right in town."

They waited for word that the smoke had cleared enough to make the highway passable. Around 8 p.m. the road reopened and they left town.

Urquhart and her kids are staying with her oldest son in Edmonton. Like many, they anxiously await word about their home.

At this point they're not sure what they'll come back to: "a house, or half a house, or a hole in the ground."

Lesser Slave Lake MLA Pearl Calahasen spent Sunday afternoon at the Slave Lake town hall, where officials had set up a command centre. At around 6 p.m., she and the town's mayor drove to Northern Lakes College to give evacuees an update.

They had no idea the fire had jumped the highway.

"We were driving back, and we were going toward the town office, and the structure behind the town office was engulfed in flames," she said. "That's how fast it happened.

"We went back to Northern Lakes College, we were telling people to hang in there, that this was the safest place," she said. "Then we lost power, and we lost the use of water."

Eventually, emergency officials installed porta-potties. Fuel trucks arrived to fill up vehicles that were low on fuel. Buses arrived.

Calahasen urged everyone with a vehicle to take as many people as they could fit, especially children. She was there until 5 a.m.

"The last person I put on the bus was a disabled man who had a motorized scooter," she said. "He wouldn't leave without his motorized scooter."



