Picking up the pieces

As Amy Paron gently rocks her six-week-old daughter Stella in the kitchen of her temporary Innisfail home she wonders what awaits her newly born child when they return to Fort McMurray next week.

“There is a lot of apprehension, some fears. It is the unknown,” said the mother of three children, whose youngest daughter was born on April 13. “This is the first time I was fully prepared to have a baby. I had the baby room, had all the baby things and had everything she needed and we had to leave it all to come here.”

The family of five fled their home from the raging wildfire in Fort McMurray on May 3 with 88,000 others citizens, arriving in Innisfail two days later as evacuees. This week, under a carefully staged re-entry plan by the Alberta government and the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, the Paron family could finally return to their home, still standing amidst the ashes of Fort McMurray.

“I think it will be hard. I grew up in Fort McMurray,” said the 32-year-old mother, who has lived in the oilsands city most of her life. “It has always been a beautiful and lush environment, and that is all going to be gone. We are going to be surrounded by everything that is burnt and that is going to take years for that to come back.

“It is going to be really sad,” she added. “A lot of our favourite spots are not going to look like they did.”

Since May 5 the family, like countless other displaced Fort McMurray citizens, has received passionate and heartfelt support from family, friends, citizens of the Innisfail community, as well as from people from across the province and country they have never met. It has helped them sustain a measure of hope for a future that has many question marks, including the status of their own home in Fort McMurray's Thickwood neighbourhood, battered and scarred from the gigantic wildfire known as “the beast,” but still standing.

“I want to get back to normal. It will be nice to feel like I am in my own place, and the comforts that go along with that,” said Amy.

Government officials will be reviewing safety conditions right up to June 1 when the first group of evacuees are tentatively allowed to return. The still out of control wildfire is estimated to have spread across almost 570,000 hectares in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The safety issue has been paramount for Amy and her husband Dan, 34, who has worked the past 11 years as a maintenance planner for Syncrude Canada, since May 3 when the skies over Fort McMurray turned black.

“I don't want to go back until it is safe for my children,” said Amy.

When the evacuation order came on May 3, the family of five had difficulty getting back to their home in the Thickwood neighbourhood, but managed to push themselves through the panic-stricken crowd of voluntary evacuees to retrieve only the barest of essentials.

“It was very surreal. You just could not believe it was happening. There were a lot of feelings of panic. There was medication issues when we could not get back to the house right away, worried about not having the medicine we needed,” said Amy, noting her husband is a type 1 diabetic, her son Hayden has severe allergies, and the critically important needs of a three-week-old baby.

The family first tried driving south on Highway 63 but was forced to turn north. They eventually made it to a work camp where they spent the night. Through a friend, Dan was able to get his family a flight to Edmonton, where they spent the night in a hotel. On May 5 they drove to the home of Dan's parents, Dennis and Terri Paron, in Innisfail.

Last week, Amy and Dan, along with Stella, their 10-year-old son Hayden and 13-year-old daughter Kharma, were still with Dennis and Terri. But this week the family is finally preparing to go home.

Kharma said she is excited to go back home and reconnect with her friends. However, she is sadly mindful the wildfire claimed the homes of two of them.

“Sometimes I don't know what I am going to feel until I actually see it,” said Kharma.

For almost a month Dan has been doing some company work from his parents' home, and he is also anxious to return to Fort McMurray to rebuild his family's life. Despite the turmoil of not knowing for certain when his family's next step forward would be, there has been one glorious benefit he will never take for granted.

“I got to spend three weeks with my baby,” said Dan. “I would not have otherwise. I would have been working every day and I wouldn't have been able to do that.”

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