Dozens of deer came out of the forest onto the road, trying to escape the fire. Looking over a lake on the route, they could see flames in the distance, in the rough direction of home. The crawling pace continued onto the main road after escaping their subdivision. I don’t know if you ever see in the movies when people are evacuating - people losing their minds and it’s all traffic? Well, that’s the way it was. One man, irate at the slow pace of evacuation, started pushing a police officer. They joined the long lineup on the only road out of their subdivision, an hour to cover the single kilometre that would have taken them four minutes otherwise.Īs they drove away from their home, smoke was billowing up behind them, the sky was black like a thunderstorm. The evacuation alert for their neighbourhood sounded as they left. It’s just like a nightmare that doesn’t end.” “The not knowing is the worst,” said Michelle. And my heart goes out to the people who don’t have a home to go to.” You don’t realize that (you might not come back) at all. “You don’t think that you’re not going to come back to your home, right? You think that you’re going to come back. “It was getting dark and smoky and ashes were flying, coming down and everybody was leaving their homes and the panic was just incredible,” said Michelle. Sean ran around the house, grabbing whatever mementos he could and stuffing them haphazardly into bags, then into the car. The people next door pulled up in the Brousseau’s driveway on the way out and insisted they come stay at their cottage near Bridgewater. Many of their neighbours were pre-emptively leaving. And then … I started to panic.”Īlready, the power in the cul-de-sac had begun to flicker … then it went out entirely. “I said we were OK and I said, ‘But it’s looking really weird outside.’ And then I got off the phone and I went outside and it started to look smoky. “And then my son called me … he’d heard about the fire in Tantallon and wanted to make sure we were OK.”Īs she spoke to her son, an emergency alert came across her phone, the first of the evacuation alerts. “I looked outside and the sun was blood red,” said Michelle. After some time though, she said, she noticed the sky looked strange outside her window. They pulled into their driveway in the cul-de-sac on Northwood Road, and Sean took a nap while Michelle puttered about.
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