By Chelsea Laskowski

Housing fire evacuees makes for hectic week at P.A. hotels

Jul 3, 2015 | 6:42 AM

Usually Prince Albert’s hotels are quiet at the start of July, but it’s been the opposite this year due to wildfire evacuations.

“We live in paradise – (normally) everybody’s travelling up to lake country,” said Mona Selanders, Travelodge’s general manager.

Instead of people heading north this year, thousands of people from the north have been heading south to Prince Albert, Saskatoon and Regina.

Most are staying in communal facilities operated by Red Cross – in Prince Albert’s Saskatchewan Polytechnic campus and Carlton Comprehensive High School have been housing hundreds of people.

Selanders lauded the Red Cross for organizing accommodations, meals, and the bigger venues. The Red Cross and First Nations bands are in charge of booking rooms, she explained.

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Many self-evacuees who booked rooms days ago as they “felt for a multitude of reasons that they needed to evacuate themselves and come and look after their own hotel rooms” have since returned to their homes, Selanders said.

Large families can’t be accommodated by Travelodge’s hotel rooms, so the Red Cross had to “get the right people in the right spots so they would all be together and sort of ease some of the anxiety that might be occurring,” Selanders said.

The change of pace has come with a different atmosphere.

“Although comfortable here, they’re worried about people that are back home, they’re worried about families, they’re worrying about dwellings. And of course a number of them have family who are actually fighting fire,” Selanders said.

She explained they’ve put in extra effort at the hotel to put the evacuees more at ease.

“The other day we set up one of the meeting rooms for the children to play in. Because it’s difficult for children to be cooped up in a hotel room for any length of time. And many of the folks here are elders. So we have to try and make it so they can be comfortable, kind of get outside,” she said.

She acknowledged going outside isn’t always possible due to health issues caused by smoke in the air.

So far the hotel has managed to keep a few rooms open for emergencies. But with a conference booked for next week, Selanders admits “things will be interesting” if fires are still keeping northern residents away from home.

There have been more than evacuees at the Travelodge in the past week.

This includes men from the midwestern United States, who had come out for a long-planned float plane fishing trip up north, Selanders said.

They were in for a rude awakening when they arrived in Prince Albert and found out how devastating the wildfires have become.

They managed to make it through the detours around La Ronge, but the last 40 miles proved too risky to make it to their plane’s takeoff location, Selanders said.

“They said it was (the fires were) like nothing that they’d seen before. And I think they probably in some small ways were perhaps happy to be over travelling.”

Instead, the men headed to Alberta’s Rockies with plans to return next year, she said.

claskowski@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @chelsealaskowsk