As residents of Yellowknife fled a wildfire in the Northwest Territories, a state of emergency was issued hundreds of miles away in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Canada’s wildfire plague widened on Friday, with Yellowknife’s 20,000 residents rushing to meet a deadline to evacuate, while blazes hundreds of miles away threatened Kelowna, a much larger city in British Columbia.
The mass migration from Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, was the biggest mandatory evacuation so far in Canada’s summer of wildfire disasters.
By midday, it remained unclear how many of Yellowknife’s residents had heeded the order as an encroaching fire loomed, but parts of the city appeared empty and most stores appeared closed.
In Kelowna, a major resort area, homes on its suburban fringes were on fire and orders to evacuate were decreed in a community where several homes were destroyed on Thursday night and others were burning on Friday.
The blazes amplified Canada’s image as an epicenter of wildfires in a year of record heat around the world, which scientists widely attribute at least in part to climate change. Canada has reported a record number of wildfires this year, with more than 5,700 burning from one end of the country to the other, some of them sending choking smoke into large parts of the United States.
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Rebecca Alty, Yellowknife’s mayor, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that as of early Friday morning 5,118 cars and trucks had crossed a bridge on the only highway out of the city to safety. A combination of scheduled airline flights, chartered and military planes, she said, had airlifted 1,500 people out of the city and thousands more were expected to fly out on Friday.
