Brenda Harvey-Jones, who lives in rural British Columbia with her husband, Adrian, says that she began to pack her belongings after evacuation alerts were issued for her area.
She said: ‘It was a very scary feeling. My main concern was that the major highway had been closed because of the wildfire and the only other road open for us to escape, Highway 24, kept closing and reopening.
‘If that closes, then you are trapped unless you know your way through the cross-country backroads but you do not really want to be driving around those in the middle of a forest fire.’
She added: ‘When we were issued with the evacuation alert, I did get a little panicky – I was very concerned, I just wanted to get up and go. It suddenly went from daylight to just an eerie, dark red glow in the sky by 3 pm and then it started raining ash.’
Around 45,000 people are thought to have been displaced by the fires this week which were tackled by around 3,000 firefighters, with extra personnel being brought in from neighbouring provinces, the military and even Australia.
Mrs Harvey-Jones, who worked in Jersey’s finance industry before moving to Canada with her husband in 1995, added that they eventually took the decision to leave their home after an order was given to evacuate a nearby town of 11,000 residents.
She said: ‘They began to evacuate William’s Lake City, which is further up the highway – thousands of people live there and they would all be heading down Highway 24. We did not want to get caught up in all of that, so we made the decision to get up and go.
‘We eventually ended up going into Alberta but what we did not realise was that there was no cellphone coverage, so we were not able to stay in touch with our relatives in Jersey, which I really did not like. They did not know what had happened to us.’
