Thousands of residents fled blazes in western Canada on Wednesday with several hundred soldiers scheduled to deploy to fight 2021’s virulent and early fires, which are wreaking havoc across portions of western North America.
“I have a holiday trailer that is my new home,” said Margo Wagner, head of a district in the western province of British Columbia, who has found herself among the evacuees.
The fire marks the second time in four years that her home in the province’s central Canim Lake rural area has been threatened by a blaze.
South of the border, a number of communities in the US are being threatened by wildfires, creating conditions so extreme that the blazes have generated their own weather, according to experts.
Nearly 80 huge fires are currently ravaging hundreds of thousands of acres in California, Oregon, Montana and Nevada.
The largest among these is still the Bootleg Fire in Oregon, which has burned through a section of land the same size as the city of Los Angeles, in just two weeks.
“The fire got so big and it creates so much energy that it started to create its own weather,” Marcus Kauffman, a specialist with the Oregon Department of Forestry, told AFP.
The Biosphere environment museum in Montreal, Canada Photo: VCG
