Canada Forest Fires Blacken 2 Million Acres

Thundershowers rumbled across Manitoba and Saskatchewan provinces on Tuesday, spilling light rain onto hundreds of forest fires that have blackened more than 2.2 million acres across a wide area of Canada.

Officials held out hope that more rain, expected overnight, would dampen the fires.

The worst forest fires in Manitoba’s history have consumed about 3,500 square miles of land--more than the combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island--and continued to burn Tuesday night.

Another 1,500 people were evacuated Tuesday from Manitoba, bringing to nearly 21,000 the number forced to leave their homes by more than 225 separate forest fires, officials said. At least 50 of the fires are burning out of control.

About 20 communities are affected, most of them reserves for Canadian Indians.

Fires have been burning in northern Manitoba since May, but a combination of dry weather, temperatures in the 90-degree range and lightning sparked major blazes over the past 10 days, provincial government spokesman Terry Laferriere said.

Pilots trying to pick up people fleeing the fires have been frustrated by smoke so thick it has turned the sun into a reddish smudge.

Clarence McDougall, 28, was among the hundreds of people evacuated Tuesday from the Garden Hill Island Lake Reserve, about 400 miles northeast of Winnipeg, as firefighters controlled the fires burning within a mile of the reserve.

Residents Panicked

“Some people are taking it in stride, but others are panicking,” said McDougall, who is staying in a hotel in Brandon. “The smoke is so bad you can’t even see your next-door neighbor. This is the worst I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“There’s no sunlight to speak of at all,” Northern Affairs Minister Jim Downey said after returning from the sparsely populated region late Monday. “It’s like dusk in the middle of the afternoon.”

Downey had flown with Manitoba Premier Gary Filmon to Thompson, The Pas and Flin Flon, where evacuees were being taken.

“It’s sometimes an hour-to-hour situation, waiting for the smoke to lift to a point where a plane can land,” provincial government spokeswoman Diana Soroka said.

Thompson, a mining city of about 15,000, has taken in more than 3,000 evacuees.

Firefighters sprayed water on a wooden railroad bridge just east of Thompson that is being used to transport evacuees.

“If that bridge goes out, then that escape route is cut off to Churchill,” Manitoba Natural Resources Minister Harry Enns told a news conference. Churchill is 260 miles northeast of Thompson.

The fire zone begins about 250 miles north of Winnipeg and stretches about 220 miles from northeastern Saskatchewan to northwestern Ontario.