Canada can’t catch a break: Raging fires now threaten Yellowknife and Kelowna, B.C.

A night­mar­ish, bru­tal year of wild­fires keeps get­ting worse for Canadians.

With a lit­tle over a month to go until the autum­nal equinox, blazes are wreak­ing hav­oc across the coun­try, with sig­nif­i­cant fires in every province and territory.

One of those fires is threat­en­ing Yel­lowknife, the lone city in the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries, which is home to much of its pop­u­la­tion. Author­i­ties there have begun orga­niz­ing an evac­u­a­tion of the city, hop­ing to get most peo­ple out before the flames poten­tial­ly reach the perime­ter of the community.

“The wild­fire sit­u­a­tion has tak­en anoth­er turn for the worse, with the fire burn­ing west of Yel­lowknife now rep­re­sent­ing a real threat to the city,” said Shane Thomp­son, NWT’s min­is­ter for the envi­ron­ment and cli­mate change. (It has become com­mon prac­tice for Cana­di­an provinces and ter­ri­to­ries to add the words “cli­mate” or “cli­mate change” to the title of their envi­ron­men­tal ministries.)

“I want to be clear that the city is not in imme­di­ate dan­ger, and there’s a safe win­dow for res­i­dents to leave the city by road and by air,” Thomp­son empha­sized at a press con­fer­ence held on Wednes­day evening. How­ev­er, he sug­gest­ed that Yel­lowknife res­i­dents leave no lat­er than noon on Fri­day, August 18th.

“With­out rain, it is pos­si­ble [the fire] will reach the city out­skirts by the week­end,” he said. “You put your­self and oth­ers at risk if you choose to stay later.”

“Crit­i­cal, chal­leng­ing days ahead – with two days of north­west to west-north­west winds on Fri­day and Sat­ur­day, which would push fire towards Yel­lowknife. Min­i­mal pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the fore­cast,” the min­istry warned in a fore­cast pub­lished on August 17th at 8 PM. “These winds would push both the Behchoko/Yellowknife Fire and the Ingra­ham Trail where we do not want them to go.”

Mean­while, in British Colum­bia, fires are shut­ting down key high­ways and threat­en­ing major com­mu­ni­ties in the province’s interior.

There’s a big fire near Kelow­na that’s burn­ing out of control.

5,500 prop­er­ties are on evac­u­a­tion alert and more than 1,000 oth­ers under order to leave due to the McDougall Creek wild­fire, accord­ing to the CBC.

“The #McDougall­Creek­Wild­fire has jumped Okana­gan Lake into Kelow­na. Hun­dreds of res­i­dents along Clifton Rd in Kelow­na are pack­ing up and leav­ing,” Glob­al’s Jamie Taw­il tweet­ed, shar­ing this video.

Cas­taNet is mon­i­tor­ing the fires and post­ing reg­u­lar updates.

The province closed High­way 1 between Hope and Lyt­ton because of fires.

Not far from Kam­loops, anoth­er pop­u­lous inte­ri­or com­mu­ni­ty, the Low­er East Adams Lake wild­fire is also prompt­ing evac­u­a­tion alerts.

And con­di­tions could quick­ly get worse.

The lead fire weath­er fore­cast­er for the British Colum­bia Wild­fire Ser­vice is wor­ried about the next few days. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, come Thurs­day, we’re keep­ing a real­ly close eye on this dry cold front…  that’s going to sweep across the province,” he told the CBC. “It’s going to bring strong gusty winds shift­ing from the south­west to the north­west. We may see some light­ning accom­pa­ny this dry cold front on Thurs­day, which could have the poten­tial of ini­ti­at­ing new fires.”

When a fire weath­er fore­cast­er says fire con­di­tions are going to be “extreme,” it’s worth pay­ing atten­tion. There are many more weeks of dry weath­er ahead, which is going to make con­tain­ing the fires that are already burn­ing chal­leng­ing. And there won’t be many resources avail­able to fight any new fires that ignite.

As of today, there have been 5,765 total fires in Cana­da, with an affect­ed area con­sist­ing of 13.749 mil­lion hec­tacres (33.97 mil­lion acres). Five peo­ple have died. 155,856 had been evac­u­at­ed as of July 7th. Alber­ta and Que­bec were par­tic­u­lar­ly hard hit ear­ly on in the year; Alber­ta is now hav­ing to pro­vide shel­ter to peo­ple who are evac­u­at­ing Yel­lowknife to escape the fire dan­ger there.

The recent tragedy in Maui is no doubt spurring the author­i­ties in the North­west Ter­ri­to­ries to act proac­tive­ly to move peo­ple out of har­m’s way. Yel­lowknife’s remote­ness makes an evac­u­a­tion logis­ti­cal­ly com­plex. It takes more than four­teen hours to dri­ve from Yel­lowknife to Edmon­ton even with light traffic.