Wildfire roars through a Canadian town popular with tourists

OTTAWA, Ontario – As much as half of a town at the heart of a jewel of Canada’s national park system has been destroyed by a pair of wildfires that roared in from two sides, an official said Thursday.

“We don’t know particularly which structures have been damaged and which ones have been destroyed, but that is going to be a significant rebuild,” Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, told a news conference. She struggled to avoid tears describing the beauty of Jasper National Park and the damage to the community that shares its name.

Pierre Martel, the director of fire management for Parks Canada, the national parks agency, told a briefing Thursday afternoon that the “aggressive and fast-moving fire” was still burning in the park.

As the fires expanded Monday evening, about 20,000 tourists and the 5,000 residents of Jasper were evacuated, mostly west to British Columbia.

On Wednesday night, wildfire fighters had to leave the town because of toxic smoke from the buildings that had caught fire. Parks Canada, which is in charge of fighting the fire, also moved its command post.

Firefighters from other communities have since arrived to help fight the blaze, which follows a recent heat wave.

Jasper National Park, along with nearby Banff National Park, is one of Canada’s premier tourist destinations and receives about 2.5 million visitors each year.

The mayor of Jasper, Richard Ireland, said Thursday that the disaster had been “almost beyond comprehension.”

After briefly restoring service through Jasper, the Canadian National Railway said Thursday that it had been forced to shut down its lines through the town, which is a major link between ports on the Pacific Coast, the rest of Canada and the United States.

Via Rail Canada, the national passenger rail service, has also suspended its trains through the area. Canadian National said it had dispatched two firefighting trains to help with the inferno. The cause of the fire has not been determined.

Jasper grew around both the railway and a resort hotel, now known as the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge, built in the early 20th century to lure tourists to the newly created park.

The town’s economy continues to rely largely on tourism and the railway, and is home to park employees and wildfire fighters.

Fairmont said Thursday that the blaze had made its way into the grounds surrounding the hotel complex, which was still Jasper’s signature tourist site. But the hotel chain said it had no information about the extent of damage to its buildings.

One resident, Mike Day, left Monday night.

He took a final sweep of his house to confirm that his family’s most important belongings for a wildfire evacuation – passports, photo albums, a few days’ worth of clothes – were packed away in their sport utility vehicle. But he said that something made him reach for his acoustic guitar just as he was headed out the door.

“At the time, I thought ‘This is silly, I shouldn’t be taking the guitar with me,’ ” Day, a restaurant owner, said. “But I’m so glad I did.”

By Thursday morning, it had become apparent that his house had burned down. A family member, who is a heavy equipment operator attempting to salvage standing buildings, had driven by the wreckage of the fire-ravaged home and sent a video. Only its foundation remained.

Like many residents of mountain communities in western Canada, Day had taken several steps to protect his house from fire including the installation of sprinklers, concrete siding and fireproof shingles.

“It obviously wasn’t enough to protect us all,” he said. “We were at the mercy of Mother Nature at that point.”

Speaking from Kamloops, British Columbia, where he and his family are sheltering, Day said that his restaurant, Evil Dave’s Grill, appeared, to his relief, to have evaded the fire.

Despite the ferocity of the fires in Jasper and the national park, Canada’s wildfire season had not been as bad as last year, when smoke wafted south to the United States and even reached Western Europe.

Last year, wildfires burned about 43 million acres across Canada, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. This year they have burned 5.8 million acres, compared with about 29 million acres burned by this time last year.

Martel said that flames from the Jasper fire have reached as high as 100 meters, more than 300 feet.

“It’s just a monster at that point,” he said. “There are no tools we have in our toolbox to deal with that. You get out of the way, you retreat and you do what you can to protect communities and infrastructure.”

Volunteers from the nearby town of Hinton assisted with the rescue of about 80 horses around Jasper Park on Tuesday morning, said Shauna Cruden, who leads a local agricultural society and helped to coordinate the equine evacuation.

The group, escorted by the police, had to act fast to rescue what animals they could from the park, with a fire smoldering in the distance, she said.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking watching it happen,” Cruden said, “and it is hard not knowing exactly what is gone and what is standing.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.