Popular ski resort Marmot Basin and tourist attraction the Jasper SkyTram both appear to have escaped damage
On Saturday, the Municipality of Jasper provided an update stating the 32,000-hectare fire has yet to be contained.
“Crews are working along the perimeter closest to town and are planning for the creation of containment lines,” the municipality’s statement reads.
“Fire suppression has been progressing well, and we are anticipating that all remaining fires within the townsite will be extinguished today.”
A Parks Canada official says the wildfire that destroyed hundreds of structures in the town of Jasper and continues to burn out of control in the national park could still be burning months from now.
“This fire is the largest one that Jasper National Park has recorded in the last 100 years,” Landon Shepherd, a deputy incident commander with the federal agency, told a news conference on Saturday afternoon in nearby Hinton.
“We’re going to be working on this wildfire, we expect, over the next three months at least. What the last five years has taught us is that the fire season in Jasper tends to last well into the fall.”
Shepherd said the region got about 12 millimetres of rain over about a day and a half, and while that was good, there were still active hot-spots near the community. And, he said, fire activity was beginning to pick up again, although not to the same degree as last week.
Damage assessment has started on utility, road and bridge infrastructure, and power is being restored to parts of the town and critical infrastructure.
The municipality stated plans are being made to allow passage of evacuees from Valemount, B.C. through the park bound for Hinton so they can reunite with family.
It also stated it had received reports of people violating the park’s closure order along the Icefields Parkway.
“While there is no risk of wildfire in these areas, it is critical that visitors do not enter the park at this time.”
Alberta Wildfire officials say recent rain has helped limit fire growth in Jasper and across much of the province, but caution a return to warmer temperatures is the forecast for next week.
Marmot Basin ‘unaffected by the fire’
The fire appears to have largely spared Marmot Basin as well as a nearby horse stable and gondola.
Brian Rode with the resort told Postmedia that Marmot Basin’s insurer contracted a private firefighting group to helicopter in and inspect the facility which was found to be largely undamaged.
“We now have confirmation that Marmot Basin is unaffected by the fire. All of our facilities, our lifts and everything are completely intact,” said Rode, adding as of now, Marmot plans to reopen this winter.
He said staff have not yet been allowed in to inspect the area and access roads are blocked by trees that blew over late Monday night in the same windstorm that spurred the fire’s rapid growth.
“Everything happened extremely quickly,” he said of the storm that prompted Monday night’s evacuation orders.
The company continues to pay staff as it figures out next steps, including at two other facilities its owns.
One of those is a stable for horseback riding that appears to have been unaffected.
The other is the Jasper SkyTram that operates on Whistlers Mountain.
Rode said the fire reached the mountainside, but that the gondola’s top and bottom terminals appear to have escaped damage. He said any relief at those facilities surviving was tempered by the realities facing much of the town.
“It’s hard to describe and your mind goes into a lot of different directions, but we’re determined and confident that everything will come back even better than before.”
‘Still an active fire site’: Smith
Speaking on her call-in radio show on Saturday morning, Premier Danielle Smith said the scenes of the fire-ravaged town she saw on a tour yesterday were difficult to watch.
“It looks really bad,” she said. “I can’t imagine how anybody, having seen their community or their home with the destruction, is going to feel today.”
She said bus trips were being organized for residents to come in and survey the damage though a permanent return was still some ways away.
“It is still an active fire site,” she said. “You don’t want the wildfire to resurge and then threaten town again.”
On Saturday, crews continued go site-by-site dousing hot spot with water.
“An ember with a flame can turn into an inferno,” Smith said.
She said fires in Jasper along with similar incidents in Fort McMurray and Slave Lake show the provincial and federal governments should re-evaluate their fire prevention and forest management strategies.
“We have to have an honest discussion with the public about the approach that we’ve taken and realized that we need to build more fire breaks,” she said.
That could mean the province having a stronger role in fires that break out in national parks, she said, though she stopped short of criticizing Parks Canada’s approach to handling wildfires, which she characterized as being similar to Alberta’s.
“I think we have the capacity and the on the ground ability to respond in a way that it should be more unified. If that requires us to be a bit more assertive and trying to change some of the rules around how they manage their parks … I do know we will be very, very active in pressing that along.”
‘We must work together’: Guilbeault
Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault posted a video to social media Saturday indicating some of that integration was already underway.
“Moving forward, Parks Canada’s emergency officials will be working within Alberta’s emergency management operations,” he said.
“We must work together to restore nature and restore the lives impacted by these terrible events.”
Both he and Smith also noted the Jasper wildfire was of such a size, speed, and intensity, that different preparations may not have had an impact.
“Sometimes nature does take its course,” Smith said.
“There wasn’t really anything anyone could have done.”
— With files from The Canadian Press