By Greg Nikkel
Less than half an hour after Candace Funk escaped from the home where she lived in a basement suite in Fort McMurray, carrying only a two-day change of clothes and her three cats, her home was gone.
“It was so sudden, nobody was really prepared,” she said in an interview. Born and raised in McTaggart, Funk has back staying with her parents, Ed and Dorothy Funk, after her brother Aron drove up from Weyburn to pick her up from a campsite at Anzac, just south of Fort McMurray, a short time before that town and area had to be evacuated.
Candace was one of the roughly 88,000 residents of Fort McMurray who had to evacuate the Northern Alberta city, and she lost everything when the home she was living in was destroyed by fire. All that remains of her house in Beacon Hill is the foundation and chimney, which her landlord sent her a photo of. Her basement suite was located just below where the chimney stood.
Like many others she knows and works with, she had no renter’s insurance, and while told by her foreman at Ledcor she has a job to come back to (tentatively by June 1), she has nowhere to live.
“I’m in limbo, and it’s not very fun,” said Candace.
Her escape from the wildfires which devastated the city began with literally no warning. The fires began on Sunday, but as she explained, the smoke was some distance away and she and her friends paid no attention to it, as this was a common sight in Northern Alberta.
Even on the fateful day the fires hit Fort McMurray, the day was perfect with a clear blue sky when Candace checked the weather outside at noon. Two hours later, she stepped outside and the blue sky was obscured by a thick cloud of smoke overhead.
“I’m a block from the tree line, and the trees there were on fire. A police car drove by and he yelled at me to get out, now. That’s when they began the evacuation,” said Candace, who ran back into her house and threw two days change of clothing into an overnight bag.
She could only find two of her pet carriers for her three cats, so she put two of them in, which left her arms covered in scratches, and put a harness on the third and ran out to her truck. As everyone was evacuating from the Beacon Hill neighbourhood, it took 10 minutes to travel the one block to exit and head to the highway.
Listening to the radio as she drove, evacuees were told to go north to Mac Island, which is a huge recreation facility, but the traffic was so thick it took her an hour just to reach the downtown area. She then heard new orders on the radio to not head to Mac Island, but to head south to Anzac, so she turned around, and discovered her truck was running low on fuel, with gas stations now all closed.
Her fuel indicator said she only had fuel for 32 kilometres until empty, so Candace headed to a tourist park near the downtown and parked there, soon joined by others in a similar situation. A stranger offered her a ride as she was heading to the campsite of a mutual friend at Gregoire Lake Provincial Park near Anzac, and soon they were heading out of Fort McMurray.
“I had never met the lady before, but we had a mutual friend who had a campsite,” she said. “We ended up with 12 people in three tents at the campsite.”
Candace noted the famous dash-cam footage of raining embers on the road with walls of flame on either side occurred only about 10 minutes after she had left Beacon Hill.
Her brother Aron had set out from Weyburn, meantime, and by noon the next day he found her at the campsite, and brought her home.
“About three hours after we left, they had to evacuate that campsite. We only got out with a couple hours to spare,” said Candace.
Sighing, Candace noted she had spoken to her foreman at Ledcor. “I do have a job to go back to, but I don’t have a home to go back to.”
She could stay at the work camp at Shell’s plant, but then she has no transportation to get to her job. To compound her problem, Candace has no idea if her 2015 Ford is still safe where she left it, or if it had been towed or sto-len.
On Monday, new wildfires had sprung up threatening the oilsand plants north of Fort McMurray, which will also affect the plans of the provincial government to start allowing city residents to come back to the city.
Premier Rachel Notley said they will know by Friday what the timing will be to allow residents to return to Fort McMurray.
Thinking back on the whole experience now, Candace said it still hasn’t really sunk in what happened.
Even in the middle of the situation, it felt very surreal to her to see all of the flames and the thick smoke, and the thousands upon thousands of residents on Highway 63 heading out of the city.
“It’s going to be a long time before I can enjoy a bonfire,” she said.
Besides the frustration of having nowhere to live and not knowing if her truck is still available for her to use, there is frustration around the help that has been extended to Fort Mac evacuees.
She was contacted by the Canadian Red Cross who will be sending her some money, but the preloaded debit cards that are being issued to evacuees are not available to her because she’s here in Saskatchewan and not at the evacuation centres in Alberta where they’re being handed out.
“The Red Cross has said they would send me $600, which is nice. It’s a start,” she said.
Candace has lived and worked in Fort McMurray since 2011, and currently her position with Ledcor involved expediting parts and quality control. She has worked with them since May of 2013, previously working at Syncrude.
