The smell of burning fills the atmosphere before suddenly dense white smoke clouds the landscape. After being closed to traffic for five days, Highway 16, which runs west from Alberta’s provincial capital Edmonton, reopened to motorists on May 10 in the morning. A few hours earlier, the flames engulfed the railway line and licked the asphalt. They left huge, black areas behind. The conifers and aspens have become somber pickets, the roadside billboards have buckled in the heat, and the meadow is nothing more than gray undergrowth from which fumaroles still sprout. Twenty-four hours a day, helicopters fly over the area, ready to sound the alarm at the slightest resumption of fire.

In this region, located 120 kilometers from the capital, the situation changes from a hundred meters to the others. Cheryl Harris, the director of a water sports center on the banks of the Pembina River, has just been allowed to return home. With tears in her eyes, she discovers the extent of the damage. The warehouses where the descent buoys were stored have turned to cinders, turning the pickup trucks that were supposed to transport them into bare steel carcasses. “Sixteen years of my life went up in smoke, we have to start all over again, reinvent everything,” she whispers, not believing it, before adding fatalistically: “But the fire remains the fire, what can we do about it?” »

A little further south, in County Brazeau, residents are still unaware of the condition of their homes. Like nearly 17,000 other people across the province, they are still under an evacuation order. All access roads to the town of Drayton Valley remain closed; The fire has been raging across an area of ​​78,000 hectares for a week without the firefighters being able to contain it. Andrew, a 35-year-old firefighter (who wishes to remain anonymous), has a coffee at the local gas station before returning to his brigade. His face is lined with tiredness after seven days of non-stop work. “ Every time we think we can overcome it in one place, we see it resurface elsewhere. I’ve known about periods of fire for ten years, but like the ones we’re experiencing today, no, that’s unknown »he blurted out, startled by the unprecedented scale of the fires to be fought.

The situation remains unstable

At their headquarters in downtown Edmonton, where the response is coordinated, Colin Blair and Christie Tucker, responsible for Alberta’s emergency services and fire departments, respectively, set up a daily update on the current fires. As week two begins, the fires are slowly declining, they announce; of the 110 outbreaks counted at the height of the crisis on May 6, when the province was incorporated into the province “Emergency”76 were still active as of Thursday May 11, including 22 in court ” out of control “.

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