Fuelled by whipping winds, fires in Jasper National Park bore down from two directions Wednesday on the historic Rocky Mountain townsite of Jasper.
Parks Canada said a wildfire to the north was five kilometres away while another approaching from the south was eight kilometres distant.
No critical infrastructure in Jasper had been damaged since the fires roared out of control late Monday night, forcing 25,000 people – park visitors and all of the 5,000 Jasper residents – to flee.
Crews scrambled to protect homes in Jasper.
They began work to bulldoze a fireguard on the town’s southern edge. They went house to house in Jasper clearing flammables. Massive sprinklers were being set up.
Parks Canada official Katie Ellsworth said the southern blaze had doubled in size to more than 100 square kilometres.
“All our efforts are focused on controlling further fire spread and protecting our community,” Ellsworth told reporters.
“We expect today that we’re going to have strong winds continuing, and we expect that this will increase our fire behaviour and fire growth on both fires on all flanks.”
Officials could not accurately update what was happening to infrastructure outside the townsite along the Icefields Parkway and Highway 16, such as picnic areas or power lines, because of smoky conditions.
With fire perimeters changing minute-by-minute, Ellsworth said the flames were about 2.5 kilometres from the Valley of the Five Lakes, a popular hiking spot.
The fires cut off road access to the Jasper townsite from the east and the south on Monday night, forcing evacuees to drive west into British Columbia in a long, slow midnight cavalcade through swirling smoke, soot and ash.
Ellsworth has said that it only took two hours between the first reports of fires starting in the area on Monday until they had become huge enough to spark the need for the overnight evacuation.
The following day, evacuees in B.C. who didn’t have a place to stay were directed to make a long, looping U-turn around the fires back to Alberta to evacuation centres in Grande Prairie and Calgary.
B.C., dealing with its own multiple wildfires and evacuees, did not have the capacity to help Alberta, officials said.
At the Grande Prairie evacuation centre, Addison McNeill recalled literally just arriving in Jasper when she was told to get out.
McNeill said she had just put her bags down after moving from Edmonton for her new job as a line cook when she got an alert on her phone that she needed to leave immediately.
“I moved there two hours before the evacuation notice,” said the 24-year-old in an interview.
McNeill said went to a nearby hotel, one of two meet-up points for those without transportation. She hopped in a recreational vehicle with others and headed out — at a snail’s pace.
“Every single person in town was beelining to one exit from about six different routes and so you get bottleneck, backups and congestion,” she said.
McNeill said as she sat inside the vehicle, she felt so close to the wildfires that the windows seemed like they were going to shatter from the pressure of the red, hot, smoky air.
She saw acts of kindness amid the swirling ash: neighbours loaning their cars to those without; people knocking on doors to see if everyone inside was OK.
“It was far from a panic,” she said.
McNeill didn’t reach Grand Prairie until Tuesday evening.
The centre has helped 50 evacuees since Monday night and 20 of them were staying in hotels, said Dan Lemieux, with the City of Grande Prairie.
“In addition to the evacuees from Jasper, we have several evacuees here from the First Nations that are further north in Alberta that have been evacuated,” he said.
Jasper resident Leanne Maeva Joyeuse said she felt relieved to have made it to Grande Prairie after 20 hours on the road with her grandmother, parents and younger brother.
She said she was anxious about how the wildfires would affect her town, but laughed as she recalled that her grandmother had just arrived from Mauritius to visit a few days before the wildfires began.
She recalled turning to her grandmother as they fled to say, “Welcome to Alberta.”
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