Canada’s Jasper National Park and the town of Jasper were ordered to evacuate Monday night as a wildfire headed toward the community.
The emergency alert said a wildfire was south of town and urged residents to evacuate by 3 a.m. local time (5 a.m. Eastern time) Tuesday.
“Everyone in Jasper and Jasper National Park must evacuate now,” the alert said, with instructions to use Highway 16 heading west toward British Columbia as other roads were closed. Jasper has about 4,500 residents, and the Alberta park is a popular tourist destination in the Canadian Rockies.
“BC will do everything we can to provide safe refuge for evacuees from Jasper and are working as quickly as possible to coordinate routes and arrange host communities on our side of the border,” Bowinn Ma, British Columbia’s minister of emergency management and climate readiness, said on social media.
Evacuees posted photos of backed-up traffic on social media. Joe Gentile, a visitor to the park from Calgary who had been planning to stay through Thursday with his family, said in a phone interview that he had been gridlocked for about four hours after filling up with gas.
Being in the town was “like being in a campfire,” he said. The air was thick with smoke and ash was raining down. But the mood was calm, he said. “The streets are full, they’re packed,” he said about 1:30 a.m. local time. “It is very slow leaving, [but] people here are very poised.”
“It appears that a bunch of campgrounds needed to be evacuated first that were much closer to the fire,” he added.
Jasper authorities acknowledged the gridlock on Facebook, saying they and Parks Canada were working on getting traffic flowing and ensuring fuel availability.
Serious wildfires flared in Canada from last week after a relatively quiet start to the fire season, renewing fears after the worst season on record last year saw tens of millions of acres burned. Fast-moving fires ignited by lightning began to move through drought-impacted western Canada last week, with Alberta and British Columbia hardest hit.
On Monday, there were about 400 out-of-control fires in the country, 56 in Alberta alone, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.
English (US) · 