Find the latest on the Jasper wildfire status on Tuesday, July 30 here.
It’s been more than a week since Jasper National Park was evacuated due to wildfires and officials have now released the criteria that must be met before it’s safe for people to re-enter the townsite.
In a post on Facebook Monday night, the Municipality of Jasper said the Jasper Emergency Advisory Committee met and agreed with the following criteria “to guide the Municipality of Jasper in our re-entry plans to bring our residents back as soon as it is safe”:
- Parks Canada has identified that the wildfire is not currently an imminent threat to the townsite.
- Hazards in the townsite have been secured or mitigated.
- Emergency services are restored to provide a basic level of service (fire, EMS, police and 911 dispatch).
- Critical services are restored to provide a basic level of service (healthcare, municipal public works, utilities, water and wastewater, electricity, natural gas, telecommunications).
- Critical retail is restored to provide a basic level of service (grocery, gas, banking, pharmacy).
- A formal re-entry plan has been approved.
“Criteria are not intended to be sequential, they can and will be addressed concurrently,” the municipality said. “Life safety will always remain the top priority, fire threat could require evacuation of the townsite at any point in the future.”
On Monday, federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said a staged re-entry plan is being developed for the town’s 5,000 permanent residents as well as its thousands of seasonal workers. Officials have maintained there is no timeline for when re-entry might happen.
“This planning process is happening alongside our ongoing efforts to manage the active, out-of-control wildfire,” the municipality said Monday night.
“We understand and appreciate your desire to come home. We are unable to give timelines yet as the site is currently unsafe, and the wildfire status remains out of control. We know and hear that residents want to come home and we will make that happen when it is safe to do so.”
On Friday, Premier Danielle Smith reminded Albertans that when Fort McMurray was evacuated due to wildfires in 2016, residents were out of their homes for about 28 days.
“Just want people to understand that this is not a fast process because you end up with embers,” Smith said Friday. “Embers can ignite and we don’t want anybody to be in their home and then all of a sudden, there’s ignition. We also want to make sure that if there’s damage to gas pipelines that the homes are re-energized and put onto gas without leaks.”
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Parks Canada said it is working on a separate re-entry plan for the national park.
“Those plans will likely be staged re-entry and we are also developing a list of criteria that has to be satisfied for those stages to occur,” said James Eastham, incident information officer for Jasper Wildfire Complex. “There is still quite a lot of work to be done. We need to make sure the areas we are bringing people back to are safe before people can return.
“We know that people are very eager to get back to their homes, to their community, back to visit Jasper and come on vacation, and we want to provide those timelines, but right now we are still in the planning phase and we aren’t able to provide that level of detail just yet. As soon as we have those details, we will share them.”
The highway through Jasper National Park remains closed. Eastham said plans are being co-ordinated on reopening the highway, but again, those plans are yet to be finalized.
“That is one of our priority areas, so we are working with the RCMP on a plan for the highway. One challenge is that the wildfire is actively burning along the highway. But we want to get commercial traffic flowing and we want to get evacuees who may be in B.C., back at least closer to the community if they want to return.”
Parks Canada also released an update Tuesday morning to say all camping reservations in its campgrounds within Jasper National Park will be cancelled through Tuesday, Sept. 3. There is currently no estimated date for reopening of the Parks Canada campgrounds within the national park.
More than 20,000 people were forced to flee the Rocky Mountain park last Monday night. Officials have said about 30 per cent of the townsite’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged by the fire.
For the latest information on which areas in Alberta are under an evacuation alert or order due to a wildfire, visit the Alberta Emergency Alert website.
For the latest information on the wildfire status and danger across the province, visit the Alberta Wildfire website.
The latest information on fire advisories, restrictions and bans across the province can be found on the Alberta fire bans website.