For two days, southeast winds had been blowing towards Gordon Wolters home. When the sky turned black and the sun glowed orange in places where it shone through the smoke billowing over his home, he knew it was time to leave.
Wolters had returned to check his home one last time after he and his family had gathered up as much of their worldly possessions as they could fit into two vehicles and a tent trailer and headed towards Slave Lake.
Sprinklers were already soaking his house from atop the roof, so he turned off the gas, grabbed a few of his childhood photos that had been left behind, and decided there was nothing more he could do, except leave.
He shot what would be the last video of his home on his iPhone saying in it, that he hopes it would be here when he got back.
Wolters then drove from his Canyon Creek residence, located just 22 kilometres west of Slave Lake, to the parking lot in town where his family had gone after being given a two-hour evacuation notice at 12:45 on May 15.
“I was working outside when my wife came out of the house and said we have to leave,” said Wolters.
“At that point you stop thinking rationally, you start to panic.”
Wolters and his family had been watching the skies since early Saturday morning when the fire started burning and his home was right in its path.
Wolters, his wife Christina, and their five children, Villiam, 12, Alexandria, 11, Elizabeth 9, Harrison, 8, and Friedrich, 3, picked up a few supplies in Slave Lake and made the decision to leave when the conditions started to worsen.
“The situation changed so fast,” said Wolters about the short evacuation notice for the town.
“The radio station went down and it was hard to make any calls because the system was either jammed or down. Nobody had any information and nobody knew what was going on,” said Wolters.
The two fires burning around the northern Alberta town of Slave Lake has become out of control and the high winds had caused one fire on the south west side of town to jump the highway and move into the municipality.
The entire town was given an evacuation notice and residents fled to nearby communities, some of which never even had time to gather extra clothes.
As of Friday, approximately 138,000 hectares of land had been burnt, in the Slave Lake wildfire management area, and a total of 94 fires had burned in the area according to Alberta sustainable resource development.
Information was being communicated through text messages and social media such as twitter and the radio station’s Facebook page, and when the situation started to get bad everyone just started running, said Wolters.
After an eight-hour ordeal that Wolters said felt like five minutes, they were making their way to Innisfail to stay with Christina’s mother.
Wolters and his family had lived in Innisfail until moving up to Slave Lake five years ago where Wolters works doing technical support.
A year after moving up north they moved into a their dream home on the lake across from a forestry reserve.
“Some of the trees there were older then a lifetime, they would never had been cut down,” laments Wolters.
Wolters has heard from friends still in the area that his house is gone but said that it’s still hard to believe, and that it’s funny how people have to see things with their own eyes.
However, despite having lost almost everything they own in last week’s fire, Wolters said he and his family were some of the lucky ones.
“We were able to get prepared and stay functional but so many other people weren’t.”
Wolters said that he has been receiving a lot of support but at the same time feels bad because he knows so many people lost more then they did.
“Everyone lost stuff that can’t be replaced,” said Wolters, adding that they will miss the restored 1968 Chevelle they were holding for his son that was left to him by his grandfather. A priceless family heirloom that is worth no amount of money, said Wolters.
The family will be living in Innisfail so the children can finish their school year and until they have a place to go back to in Slave Lake.
The day after they arrived in Innisfail the Wolters family started preparing insurance claims and getting the children back into school.
“If you can’t focus on putting one foot in front of the other it will totally destroy you,” said Wolters, who is trying not to dwell on the loss but on rebuilding.
He is calling this experience Life 4.0, as it is the fourth setback, the fourth time they have had to refocus, in the last few years.
“When you rebuild you just have to build up better and stronger.”
Wolters hopes his story will encourage people to help the victims of the fire that destroyed one third of the Town of Slave Lake, stressing the importance of giving cash donations. He said that while clothes and toiletries are needed and appreciated, cash is what will help the town and the people rebuild for the long term.
Innisfail residents are already stepping up to try and do what they can. Staff and students from Innisfail Middle School spent last week collecting donations to be sent to relief centers up north. They managed to collect enough donations to fill several truckloads, which were sent to Red Deer to a donation centre.
“We chatted with the students about the fire because they had seen so much about it on the news. We asked them to think about all they things they use and need just when getting ready for school in the morning,” said Tom Stones, a Grade 6 teacher at IMS. “They quickly realized they would need everything.”
Another fundraiser is being organized by three Innisfail women who all felt that our community could be doing more.
“We should help out a community to rebuild that is so similar to ours,” said Jenna Strong, who grew up going camping in Canyon Creek near Slave Lake and has several friends there that lost their homes.
Strong, along with her friends Cindy Bacque, and Rhonda Ebbert, are organizing a community garage sale scheduled for Friday, June 10, beginning at 10 a.m. The Innisfail Legion donated the auditorium to be used for the sale.
The girls are accepting any kind of donations for the sale, and anyone interested in donating items can drop them off at Innisfail Middle School on June 5, from 10 a.m until the end of the school day. The proceeds from the fundraiser will be donated to the Town of Slave Lake, as will any leftover items from the garage sale. More information about the fundraiser can be found by contacting [email protected].
