Ottawa, Canada—Residents of the northern Canadian city of Yellowknife started returning home Wednesday (Thursday in Manila), three weeks after wildfires forced its evacuation as tens of thousands across the Northwest Territories fled.
“We’re home!” exclaimed Steph Hendrix on Instagram, posing with a broad smile under blue skies outside her house in Yellowknife, with her partner and their dog.
She said they were excited to drive home, but that “seeing the devastation of the fires along the way was sobering and sad.”
An evacuation order was downgraded on Wednesday as the fire threat has subsided.
Although officials said there has been no fire damage to infrastructure and property in the regional capital, residents were told to brace for new measures to control blazes.
The first flights to Yellowknife landed in the morning while thousands were expected to arrive by car over the coming days.
A big “Welcome Home” sign on the side of the highway marked the way for drivers.
Waiting for them, according to officials and local media, Yellowknife grocery stores have stocked their shelves, and municipal services such as garbage pickup were set to resume this week.
“I want to extend a warm welcome back home,” Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty said in an online video post.
“Yellowknife will look a little different,” she said, pointing to fire breaks installed around the city to help protect it.
She urged residents to be self-reliant for a few days on their return and to be patient as “stores are getting up and running.”
For some it will be a long trip back, as evacuees had spread out across Canada, from Vancouver to Ottawa.
Some homes in small towns and hamlets in the Northwest Territories were destroyed in the fires.
Kelsey Worth, 35, told AFP she planned to go back to Yellowknife on Thursday.
She’d driven 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) to safety in Alberta province when the evacuation of Yellowknife was ordered last month, and moved around a lot since then — staying mostly with friends and at campgrounds.
“I’m obviously getting very, very tired. I need to sleep in my own bed,” she said.
Yellowknife had declared an emergency suddenly as fires raged closer in mid-August.
Thousands crammed into the local airport to board emergency evacuation flights or joined convoys that snaked to safety to the south on the only open highway.
The emptying of Yellowknife meant two-thirds of the population of the near-Arctic territory was displaced.
The order to evacuate marked another chapter of a grim summer for wildfires in Canada, with vast swathes of land scorched and by September 200,000 people displaced nationwide.
Currently, there are still more than 1,000 fires raging across Canada, including 239 in the Northwest Territories. AFP