Two neighboring provinces in Canada’s prairies have declared states of emergency as dozens of wildfires have flared up and grown out-of-control, displacing thousands of residents.
Scott Moe, the premier of Saskatchewan, issued the emergency order Thursday, one day after his peer, Wab Kinew of Manitoba, did the same.
Fifteen communities have been evacuated across northern Saskatchewan, a rural region home to several Indigenous reserves.
“I do fear things are going to deteriorate with the weather that we have ahead of us,” Moe told reporters at a news conference Thursday. The forecast showed no signs of much-needed rain, while warm overnight temperatures and expected high winds could accelerate the flames.
Canada’s wildfire season, which tends to be the most active from May to September, had a grim start in Manitoba earlier this month with the deaths of two people who were trapped and killed in a small western town before they could evacuate.
The emergency orders will be in place for at least 30 days. They enable public safety officials to mobilize resources more quickly and ask for help from other provinces. Wildland firefighting crews from British Columbia and Nova Scotia are already helping put out the Saskatchewan blazes.
In Manitoba, about 17,000 residents are under evacuation orders as fires rage in the north and east of the province. As Kinew declared the state of emergency Wednesday, he urged residents to heed official warnings and head toward urban areas like Winnipeg, if possible, to access temporary housing and emergency assistance.
“This is the largest evacuation that Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” Kinew said at a news conference.
The Canadian military would assist with the evacuations, including with emergency flights, Kinew added, because of the “sheer scale” of the effort.
So far this year, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have seen the most damage from Canada’s wildfires, with 1.5 million acres burned across the two provinces, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. That is an area roughly the size of Delaware.
Canada experienced record-breaking wildfires in 2023, which turned out to be the biggest cause of global carbon emissions that year, researchers found.
In 2021, the country was struck by a crippling heat wave that wilted parts of the Pacific Northwest. The heat dome caused 619 heat-related deaths in British Columbia, fueled a wildfire that destroyed a town in the province and stoked widespread droughts, prompting handfuls of farmers in Manitoba to sell off their cattle herds, unable to feed the animals.
The country had a reprieve last year with a milder wildfire season.
It is not yet clear how this year’s season could go. But June is a critical month. That is when western Canada tends to get the most rain, said Richard Carr, a fire research analyst in Canada’s natural resources department.
“If we get that rain in June, it might keep things a little quieter leading into the summer,” Carr said. “But if June comes out to be dry, then it kind of sets the stage for a fairly active summer period.”
