17,000 Evacuated In Manitoba As Fires Sweep Across North; 134 Fires Nationwide, Half Out Of Control

[hatrack]

More than 17,000 people in Canada’s western Manitoba province were being evacuated on Wednesday as the region experienced its worst start to the wildfire season in years. “The Manitoba government has declared a province-wide state of emergency due to the wildfire situation,” Manitoba’s premier, Wab Kinew, told a news conference. “This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory.”

Kinew said he had asked the prime minister, Mark Carney, to send in the Canadian military to help with the evacuations and firefighting. Military aircraft, Kinew said, would be deployed “imminently” to help move people out of endangered remote northern communities to safety, along with additional firefighting resources.

The climate crisis has made wildfires in Canada more frequent and intense. The country has been hit with devastating fires in recent years, including in 2023, the most destructive on record. There are now 134 active fires across Canada, including in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. Half are considered out of control.

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Twenty-two wildfires were active in the province. Nearly 200,000 hectares of forests have been scorched in just the past month, or triple the annual average over the previous five years, Kirstin Hayward of the Manitoba wildfire service said. “Manitoba has the highest fire activity in Canada so far this year, due in part to a prolonged period of warm and dry conditions,” she said. About 1,000 residents of Lynn Lake and Marcel Colomb First Nation in Manitoba and 4,000 people from the northern village of Pelican Narrows and other communities in neighboring Saskatchewan had already been evacuated earlier in the week.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/29/canada-wildfires-manitoba-province-fire-evacuation

[Botany]

1. Climate change is real.

The areas that are burning shouldn’t be because they are Tiaga or Boreal Forests that
should stay wet year round. 5 months of snow packs and the ground level of those
ecosystems should be wet the rest of the year too.