Northwest Territories officials said on Friday evening that more than 19,000 people have fled from Yellowknife due to wildfires and urged those who remain to also leave as soon as possible.
The N.W.T. government on Wednesday ordered Yellowknife’s 20,000 or so residents to leave the capital city — and urged people who couldn’t leave by road to register for flights out of Yellowknife — as a nearby wildfire threatened to reach the city within days.
Yellowknife Mayor Rebecca Alty on Friday evening again urged the roughly five per cent of residents who haven’t left yet to urgently do so.
There are no more safe places. Here in Germany, we’re also starting to get major wildfires and we’re completely unprepared. We have a total of zero firefighting planes, mostly using police and military helicopters. Our firefighters are doing training in countries like Greece or Portugal because we have no experience here. And still, most people think it’s just a bad year or bad decade and it will all magically go away very soon.