Some Hay River evacuees returning to heavy losses after harrowing escapes from wildfire

Sandra Lester calls Peace River, Alta., the most hospitable town she’s ever been to. Still, after a month living in a hotel room there, she wants to get back to Hay River, N.W.T., this weekend.

“I want to go home,” she told CBC News before the weekend.

“I don’t even have a home to go to, and I want to go home.”

Lester lost her home when a wildfire ripped through the Paradise Gardens and Patterson Road areas, just south of Hay River, last month.

So as residents of Hay River finally return this weekend after a month-long evacuation, Lester is among those in the area who have lost everything, and don’t know exactly what they’re returning to.

Her home was near the Patterson sawmill, a business founded south of Hay River in the 1960s by her late father and later taken over by her brother Daniel. Lester, 74, has lived in that area almost all her life. She and her late husband built their own Patterson Road home in 1983 and raised three daughters there.

It’s all gone now — the small cluster of homes on Patterson Road including Lester’s, the sawmill, and the vast piles of firewood that were to heat homes throughout the South Slave region this winter.

Still, Lester could have lost more. She barely escaped with her life.

Pitch black from smoke

She was at home that day, Aug. 13, when the fire seemed to appear almost out of nowhere. She had been told it was still many kilometres away and believed there was no real urgency as she packed up some things to be ready to leave.

Lester recalled how she was still putting stuff in a suitcase when she looked out the window and saw fire moving down the hill nearby. She watched trees in her yard go up like torches and her porch start to burn as she scrambled to get to her truck. She had to drive across the lawn to escape because a tree had already fallen across the driveway.

“By the time I got up onto Patterson Road, it was pitch black and you couldn’t see. The smoke was just horrendously black,” she recalled.

Her brother Daniel, who runs the sawmill, had earlier told her he was going to bring his camper down to the river in case things got bad. The river has been extraordinarily low this summer so you could drive right out onto the riverbed, hopefully far enough from anything that would burn.

Lester decided to head to the river but was having a hard time finding her way through the smoke. She kept driving into the ditch.

That’s when her brother’s lights appeared in her rearview mirror. She ended up following him down onto the riverbed, right to the water’s edge. They sat there for the next couple of hours watching the fire roar along the banks and eventually jump the river in front of them.

“We could hear our fuel tanks exploding, and our houses, you could hear explosions — we knew everything was lost,” Lester said.

“We were very calm on the river, like we were just sitting there and every once in a while, I’d say, ‘Do you think we’re going to die down here?’ And he’d say, ‘no, we’re not going to die. We’re OK.'”

‘You could hear it coming’

A neighbour in the Paradise Gardens area, Alex McMeekin, also lost everything in the fire that day and also had to desperately seek refuge by the river when the flames suddenly tore through the area.

His wife had already left earlier that day to head south with their two young kids, but McMeekin had stayed behind to move some equipment from his business to an open area where it might be safer from fire. He figured he had time.

But like Lester, the fast-moving fire caught him by surprise.

“From what we had seen, it looked like it was moving towards town and would skirt us, potentially,” he recalled.

“I had gone up the hill to kind of just assess and see where things are at. And you could hear it coming … it was very close at that point. Probably within a click.”

He ran down to unhook the last pieces of equipment he had been moving. He noticed his back felt hot, and turned to see the fire coming down the hill toward him.

“That thing was moving very fast,” he said.

He and another neighbour rushed to try to drive up to the highway and escape, but trees had fallen on the road and the smoke was too thick to see much. They turned back, feeling trapped.

“You don’t know what you’re going into. You know, you have a tree come down on you, you know, the way everything was burning, the winds were blowing,” he recalled.

“There’s a split moment there where you certainly question your decisions, when you realize you can’t get out and you’re trapped. But you can’t let that thought creep in at all.”

They drove down to where it might be safest: beside the river. McMeekin figured if they had to, they could get into the water.

Fortunately, they didn’t. The fire was high up on the embankment and they were down below. The wind seemed to move the fire and embers away up the valley and they waited for the air to clear enough to navigate their way back up the hill.

“As we drove towards our place, you know, you could see a glowing and then you hear popping and there’s a few explosions. But as we got up there then, you know, we see, well, there’s our house, fully engulfed,” he recalled.

“At that moment, you know, you don’t really care … it is what it is.”

Soon it was clear enough for McMeekin and his neighbour to reach the highway, stopping along the way to cut a few fallen trees out of the way.

Flames ‘everywhere’

Orlanda Patterson tells a similar, harrowing tale of narrow escape that day. Her family’s Patterson Road home, also now gone, was right across the road from her aunt Sandra Lester’s.

Patterson was at home with her 20-year-old daughter that day while her husband was firefighting in Fort Smith. She got a call from her husband telling her it was time to leave, right away.

She and her daughter scrambled to get some things in their truck while they could. They didn’t have much time.

“My daughter comes racing in the house and she’s screaming. And I’m like, ‘what’s going on?’ And she’s like, ‘the lawn is on fire!'” Patterson recalled.

Moments later, the fire seemed to be “everywhere.” The lawn, garden, and bushes were all aflame.

They bolted for the truck.

“I was putting my head down because there was swirling flaming debris coming at me. Like, flaming debris everywhere. It was terrifying. So I just basically put my arm up and my head down and ran through it as best I can,” Patterson said.

“My last call to my husband was, ‘everything’s on fire, I think I lost the house.’ And that’s when communication died. That was the last thing he heard.”

Looking forward

Patterson and her daughter eventually managed to drive to safety that day, as did McMeekin and Lester.

But Patterson says the ordeal has left her deeply shaken. She’s noticed that she can be unsettled now by unlikely things — the sound of rain, for example, can remind her of falling debris.

“It’s kind of crazy, how it sneaks up on you,” she said.

“Once I start thinking about everything, it’s very overwhelming. You know, where am I gonna live, where am I gonna stay, what’s going to happen.”

Still, she knows her family will rebuild at Patterson Road. As far as she knows, the others will too.

“Gives us something to look forward to,” she said.

McMeekin is also looking to get back and start rebuilding his family’s home and greenhouse business at Paradise Gardens. The business already suffered a major blow when the area flooded last year, so McMeekin feels he’s been through some of this before.

“Well, the world keeps turning on. I mean, we’ve got work that needs to be done,” he said.

“Unfortunately these things, you know, tend to get a little bit more difficult before they get better … it’ll be a challenge for sure.”

Sandra Lester planned to be on the road driving north by Sunday. She’s also not exactly sure what the weeks and months ahead look like for her, but she knows she’ll have plenty of support from her friends and family in Hay River.

“People have just literally come out of the woodwork and said to me, like, ‘Sandra, I’m making you a new pair of beaded slippers.’ And, ‘Sandra, I’m giving you a new quilt,’ … It’s just remarkable how many kind people there are,” she said.

“I’m going to survive this. I know that. There’s no doubt in my mind I’m gonna survive it. It’s just I want everybody to survive and thrive just like I’m going to.”