More people were packing up to flee their homes Thursday morning as wildfires raged in Newfoundland along the western shore of Conception Bay, about 45 kilometres northwest of St. John’s.
The flames had destroyed about a dozen homes since Wednesday afternoon, said Gerry Rogers, a resident of the amalgamated town of Small Point-Adam’s Cove-Blackhead-Broad Cove, N.L.
Rogers was emotional as she paced her home on Thursday morning, packing up her belongings to leave. She could see the flames creeping closer toward her house when she looked out the window, she said in an interview.
“To be somewhere where there’s a raging fire—a raging fire!—and you’re surrounded by water,” Rogers said, her voice catching. “It’s so ironic, you know? Because we’re right on the ocean.”
Officials with the municipality of 415 people declared a state of emergency just after 10 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
Rogers said she first saw the smoke on Wednesday afternoon, as she was driving home from Carbonear, a larger centre about four kilometres east of Small Point-Adam’s Cove-Blackhead-Broad Cove.
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“We could see the fire over the hill, and it spread so quickly,” she said. “We have hardly had any snow at all in the past two years, and there’s been no rain. The earth is parched here.”
Water bombers doused the flames all afternoon and into the evening, but they stopped when it got dark. Residents of nearby Adam’s Cove and Western Bay were ordered to evacuate on Wednesday, and Rogers said her neighbours had also left by Thursday morning.
The water bombers were delayed that morning because of fog, she said, but they were back in the air by 10:30 a.m.
“Our own firefighters are so tired,” she said. “They don’t say that, but they’ve been at it. During the night, they were doing the best that they could to try to save more homes.”
“It’s different because we don’t have fire hydrants,” she added. “Trucks have to go to the pond and fill up and then go back to the fire.”
The province’s wildfire dashboard showed two out-of-control fires burning in the region on Thursday, and officials have set up several emergency centres for people who can’t get back to their homes because of the flames.
Provincial officials did not provide any information or interviews Thursday morning, but a spokesperson said the Department of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture expects to issue an advisory later in the day.
The Canadian Press correction: This is a corrected story. An earlier version stated that wildfires were burning northeast of St. John’s, but they are located northwest of the city.
