Canadian wildfires

[megletthesecond]

O.M.G

The dash cam footage of the drivers leaving the city and the security cameras filming the fire talking hold of the house . Stuff of nightmares.

It is awful- I am surprised it has so relatively little coverage on our news given the scAle.

I just came on here to post about this! Glad to find a thread.

The scale is just unbelievable - a town the size of Bath or Durham has been completely evacuated. At one point, 25k people were trapped in mining camps just north of the city. It'll probably be weeks before they are allowed home.

Amazingly little media coverage though the grauniad has been quite good.

I don't think there will be any homes for them to return to I'm afraid

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36235175

I hope everyone is evacuated safely.

The scale of what is happening is staggering already, and apparently set to worsen over the next 24 hours.

It sounds like downtown and some northern parts of the city have been spared.

random on the bbc site there was a video of a guy abandoning his house and saying he wouldn't ever see it again.

I think smoke damage is probable to those not burnt which is hideous enough on its own also just returning to a place where most of it is gone, many friends no longer able to live there.

Just hideous & life changing.

also on my Facebook timeline (I'm canadian and follow their news) there was pics of people with their pets on a plane..West Jet airline has allowed them to bring them into the cabin

Yes, it has to take years for a community to recover from a collective trauma like this. Even people who are able to return to their homes will have colleagues, friends, family who never return.

I was surprised not to find any threads here about the fires, until now, although I guess there's nothing to say except how dreadful and terrifying it is. I wondered if there were any MNers affected. I'd never heard of wildfires in Canada before, only in California and Australia.

It's absolutely catastrophic

There are forest fires in Canada every year, but because it's very big and very sparsely populated they rarely threaten any large centres of population. Unfortunately this one has happened in the wrong place at the wrong time, after an exceptionally warm winter with low snow cover.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36242433

It's doubled in size.

They desperately need rain.

I was just watching videos of this. It's terrifying, those poor people. The dashcam footage is scary, I really don't think I could drive under those circumstances.

I saw on the news today that they have incredibly saved 90% of the buildings in the city. That's incredible really.

Oops too many incredibles