GRAND PRAIRIE, ALBERTA – Addison McNeill had just put her bags down after moving to Jasper 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 outside an evacuation centre in Grand Prairie, Alta.
“I was at that point very reliant on this new job to maintain my stability. But now, I don’t really know what’s going to come next.”
McNeill was among the thousands of residents, tourists, campers, and boaters who were ordered to pack their essentials in an hour and leave the largest national park in the Canadian Rockies on Monday night as wildfires moved toward the community and cut off all but one road leading out.
McNeill said she picked up the three packed bags she came with to Jasper again and went to go to a nearby hotel, one of the two meet-up points she was directed to. That’s where she hopped in an RV with others in town who didn’t have a way to leave.
It took about three hours for McNeill and 4,700 residents of the Jasper townsite to exit the area.
“Every single person in town was beelining to one exit from about six different routes and so you get bottleneck, backups and congestion.”
McNeill said as she sat inside the RV, 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 said as darkness loomed over the town and ash swirled in the air, she felt calm seeing acts of kindness such as neighbours loaning their extra cars to those who didn’t have one and people knocking on doors to see if everyone inside was OK.
“It was far from a panic. It was really actually nice to see given what could have been a very strong state of commotion.”
Katie Ellsworth, an incident commander with Parks Canada, told a media briefing Tuesday evening that an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people, including residents and visitors, fled from Jasper.
“The evacuation of the townsite is complete, and the evacuation of hikers in the backcountry is ongoing,” she said.
Evacuees were initially ordered to go to British Columbia but were directed on Tuesday to make a wide U-turn as that province was dealing with its own wildfires, proceeding north and east to Grande Prairie, or south to Kamloops before going east to Calgary.
The delay caused heavy traffic in the area and McNeill didn’t reach Grand Prairie until Tuesday evening.
She said she immediately went to the town’s Bonnetts Energy Centre, a multi-purpose arena transformed into an evacuation registration centre.
Inside a large room, workers were seen sitting behind tables registering evacuees, asking them if they needed accommodations, food or toiletries.
The centre has helped 50 evacuees since Monday night and 20 of them are staying in local hotels, Dan Lemieux, with the City of Grande Prairie, said Wednesday morning.
“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.
He said every person who has registered so far has been “relatively positive” and Grande Prairie is expecting 30 to 40 more evacuees Thursday.
Jasper resident Leanne Maeva Joyeuse said in an interview at the evacuation centre Tuesday evening that she felt relieved to have made it there after 20 hours on the road with her grandmother, parents and younger brother.
But she’s anxious about how the wildfires will affect her town.
“We’re just waiting to go back home and see how many days we’re going to be stuck here,” said Joyeuse.
The evacuation centre had offered her family a hotel room for three nights.
She said her whole family was feeling mentally exhausted from the ordeal, but her dad was also physically tired as he is the only one who can drive in the family and was behind the wheel the entire trip.
She laughed as she said her grandmother had just arrived from Mauritius to visit her family in Jasper a few days before the wildfires began roaring in the province amid a sweltering heat wave.
Then she turned to her grandmother and said, “Welcome to Alberta.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2024.
