The government of Manitoba declared a state of emergency as more than 100 wildfires burned Friday in the central Canadian province, where blazes are on pace to scorch the most land in 31 years.
Wildfires have burned 2.5 million acres of land this year, provincial officials said on Thursday at a news briefing. On Friday morning, at least a dozen fires were considered out of control. At this pace, Manitoba is set to see the most land burned by wildfires since at least 1994, according to provincial data.
Higher temperatures this summer are aggravating Canada’s wildfire season, which usually runs from March through October. Most blazes in Canada are triggered by lightning strikes. Winnipeg, the provincial capital, was under a severe thunderstorm warning overnight.
Nine communities were under mandatory evacuation orders and cleared out in the past few days, including the town of Snow Lake, south of Winnipeg, and the Garden Hill First Nation in the middle of the province.
“The primary reason that we have called this latest state of emergency is because we need access to more facilities to be able to shelter this large number of Manitobans who are being forced to flee their homes as a result of these wildfires,” Wab Kinew, the premier of Manitoba, said on Thursday.
More than 4,000 people were evacuated from the Garden Hill reservation on Thursday, he said, adding that evacuees would be housed in Winnipeg’s Billy Mosienko Arena and RBC Convention Center. The federal government has sent an air force plane to help transport evacuees, according to Eleanor Olszewski, the minister of emergency management and community resilience.
Mr. Kinew said American firefighters were on the ground in Manitoba to help put out wildfires. He criticized members of the U.S. Congress for politicizing the wildfires, after six Republican representatives from Minnesota and Wisconsin wrote a letter asking the Canadian government to mitigate the fires, which cause smoke and ash to blow over the border, limiting summertime activities in those two American states.
“This is what turns people off from politics, when you have a group of Congresspeople trying to trivialize and make hay out of a wildfire season when we’ve lost lives in our province,” Mr. Kinew said on Thursday.
Mr. Kinew declared a state of emergency in May as wildfires killed two people in Manitoba and 30,000 people fled their homes in Manitoba and neighboring Saskatchewan.
Francesca Regalado is a Times reporter covering breaking news.
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