Scotty Frank rushed to the shore as a ferocious wildfire devoured his remote Indigenous community in northwestern Ontario. A friend who works for the railway had tipped him off to the fire’s path and Mr. Frank started knocking on doors. With little notice, all 26 residents climbed into fishing boats and chugged across the lake.
“Fire, angry fire, was coming right at us, and it was making its way along the shoreline,” said Mr. Frank, 29, of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, whose arm hair was singed in the evening escape a week ago. “The heat, the smoke, it was terrifying seeing that behind us.”
On the water, the boats’ small motors churned against waves. The fire behind them thundered like a freight train.
“If we weren’t in our boats, we would have been stuck in that flame,” said Mr. Frank, who fled later that day for Thunder Bay, Ontario, a city of about 123,000 people 130 miles southeast of the fire region, that is hosting evacuees.
Wildfires tearing across northwestern Ontario have sent heavy smoke across major cities in Canada and the United States, displaced 1,800 people and fomented mistrust toward the provincial authorities, whom many evacuees blame for inadequate warnings about the danger.
Premier Doug Ford of Ontario, visiting Thunder Bay on Saturday, assured evacuees during a televised news conference that no expense would be spared for firefighting. Later that day, he stopped by an arena retrofitted to be an emergency shelter, with about 150 cots and supplies for evacuees still expected to arrive.
Some of the people who had been displaced to the city fumed.
“I am furiously angry,” said Joy Neill, the owner of Bear Paw Lodge, a fishing and hunting outfitter in Armstrong, Ontario, who evacuated to Thunder Bay. She learned that neighboring communities were leaving immediately from Facebook posts late in the evening on July 13. The police came knocking about 40 minutes later, Ms. Neill said, though she had already awakened her guests.
Exasperated residents fired questions at a worker from the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources, who presented maps and a wildfire update on Saturday afternoon in a Thunder Bay hotel conference room. According to the ministry’s data, the fire covered roughly 7.9 million acres — about half of the total area burned in the province.
“I have no understanding why the ministry was not on top of this weeks ago, a month ago even,” Ms. Neill told the room, her voice rising as she referred to sightings of fire in the area as early as May. Her neatly pinned hair shook slightly as she pointed a finger for emphasis. “This should never, ever have happened.”
The isolated region northwest of Thunder Bay where nearly 150 wildfires were burning on Monday is a destination for campers, some of whom relied on their survival skills, sleeping in canoes or paddling to sandbars in the lake to await rescue during the evacuations last week.
The constellation of lakes around Thunder Bay has been an advantage for firefighters, serving as both a buffer to flames and a water source for pumps and hose lines, said Dave Tarini, the city’s fire chief. But the lakes aren’t a sure defense.
“When those fires are very intense, there’s potential for it to jump across lakes, creeks, rivers,” Chief Tarini said. “We can’t always rely on them to provide a reliable natural boundary.”
Closer to the wildfires, a two-hour drive west of Thunder Bay, Quetico Provincial Park sits near the edge of the flames. On Sunday, the lake glistened and the wind was gentle under a beating sun. But new blazes had sprung up in the distance. The park was eerily empty, a hose running along the road every hundred feet or so to pump lake water into the sprinkler systems installed on camp cabins.
As nature offered no guarantees, residents rose to the challenges. Most firefighters in the sprawling region’s rural communities are unpaid volunteers, essential to the security of small-town living in northern Ontario.
At the Thunder Bay fairgrounds, volunteers tended to rescued livestock, and a hotel conference room became a donation hall. Boxes overflowed with teddy bears, and Crocs and boat shoes lined the floor. Tables were stacked high with donated clothing. Outside, an Indigenous healer offered herbs for lung health, like mullein and wintergreen, in small plastic bags.
Marilyn Matinet, a retired educational assistant from Whitesand First Nation, about 150 miles north of Thunder Bay, lingered in the donation hall, thinking of her pets. She evacuated in a frenzy last week. She managed to bring her dogs along, but her 11-year-old cat, Silver, hid despite the treats she left out to coax him. “I cried because I didn’t do his cat litter and I didn’t refill his water,” Ms. Matinet, 69, said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Many of the 500 residents who fled Whitesand First Nation are homesick, a feeling that settled in about midway through the three-hour drive to the city.
“It was very emotional,” said Hope Tibishkogijig, a councilor with the first nation. “We didn’t know what we were leaving behind, if we were even going to have homes when we went back.”
A handful of residents, defying orders to stay away from the area, and returned to assist the ministry staff with building fire barriers around the community, which has so far been spared.
“Mother Nature — I don’t know, she’ll do what she has to do,” Ms. Tibishkogijig said. “But right now, she’s showing us mercy.”
