N.W.T. wildfires destroy town of Enterprise, threaten Yellowknife: ‘Everything I loved in life is gone’
Debilitating smoke has been hanging over the heads of many in Yellowknife for days and a wildfire on the outskirts of the northern city is growing steadily.
“It’s a little unnerving,” said Wayne Langenhan, one of many residents scrambling to sort out an evacuation plan.
There was some blue sky Wednesday but that isn’t diminishing the anxiety and stress many in the northern city are experiencing.
“I think it’d be better if I had a few beers,” Langenhan said — perhaps only half joking.
There’s been more than 200 wildfires this season across the Northwest Territories that have already burned an area four times the size of Prince Edward Island.
“The Northwest Territories has never faced a situation like this in terms of wildfire,” wildfire information officer Mike Westwick said Wednesday.
“The thing that is making this year much different is the scale — the human toll of what’s being faced.”
Westwick said normally, most of the wildfires are in remote areas.
“We have a lot of open spaces here. This year, the fires are happening close to communities, and that’s causing major, major stress for people,” Westwick said.
Westwick said eight communities have evacuated, representing 15 per cent — or nearly 6,800 people — of the territory’s population.
“It’s unimaginable, what people are going through up here.”
One of those fires all but wiped the small community of Enterprise, some 80 kilometres north of the Alberta border on the Mackenzie Highway, off the map.
“I lost quite a bit,” said Paul Flamand, a father-of-three from Enterprise who fled north to the community of Wrigley.
Flamand runs a plumbing business in the community of 100 people where nearly every building was consumed by flames earlier this week.
“I lost my house, a
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