Some 10,000 people have been ordered to leave a town in Quebec, amid hundreds of fires burning across the country.
About 10,000 people have been ordered to leave a coastal town in the Canadian province of Quebec, marking the latest evacuation amid weeks of wildfires through the country.
Friday’s order for Sept-Iles residents came after a nearby fire “advanced very quickly” overnight, according to the town’s mayor, Steeve Beaupre, who declared a local state of emergency.
Bill Blair, the country’s public safety minister, said the ferocity of Canada’s early wildfire season this year is unprecedented, with more than 1,826 fires burning 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million hectares). acres) of land.
Across Canada, more than 210 fires were still burning Friday, with some 29,000 people evacuated ahead of the latest order in Quebec, he said.
Stephane Lauzon, a member of Quebec’s parliament, told a news conference in Ottawa that around 100 fires were burning in the province, “many more than yesterday.”
“The situation is changing rapidly in Quebec,” Lauzon said. Approximately 20 of those fires were classified as out of control.
fierce fires have recently devastated Nova Scotia, on Canada’s Atlantic coast, after large outbreaks scorched large swaths of the western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan in mid-May.
“This is a terrifying time for many people from coast to coast,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Friday.
Forest fires are more common in western Canada, but fires along the Atlantic coast have underscored the increasingly extreme weather the country has faced in recent years amid rising global temperatures.
About 200 homes were destroyed and nearly 20,000 residents displaced in Nova Scotia, where busloads of residents were taken on Friday to tour the damage in the province’s largest city, Halifax.
Nova Scotia’s climate is strongly influenced by the North Atlantic Ocean, which typically brings higher humidity and more moderate temperatures than many other parts of the country.
While fires are not unusual, they tend to be much smaller than those in the west, with the region buffered in part by the vast Acadian forest of broadleaf trees that are less flammable than other species.
However, speaking to the Reuters news agency, Weather Network meteorologist Michael Carter said the region received little snowfall during the winter, followed by an exceptionally dry spring, contributing to the current fires.
Ellen Whitman, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service, told the news agency that while it is difficult to determine the impact of climate change in a single fire season, Canada’s Atlantic provinces have been much hotter than usual. Scientists expect temperatures in the region to continue to rise in the coming years.
Across Canada, the land burned by wildfires in 2023 is more than 10 times the average typically burned at this time of year, Public Safety Minister Blair said on Friday, citing data points from the past decade.
At least 93 of the active fires in the country were still labeled out of control, he said, adding that 1,000 firefighters from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States had arrived or were en route to bolster suppression efforts.
Ottawa has also begun deploying the military to Nova Scotia to help, he said.
“The situation remains dire throughout the country,” Blair said.
Weather forecasts show a period of cooler, wetter air moving into the Atlantic regions of Canada on Friday, and experts hope the conditions will provide relief from the blazes.
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