SANDY LAKE – Much land was “devastated” by the forest fire that forced an evacuation of the Sandy Lake First Nation reserve, but luckily no lives were lost and the community’s leadership has pulled through.
That, in a nutshell, was Kiiwetinoong MPP Sol Mamakwa’s assessment after a recent visit to the reserve some 230 kilometres northeast of Red Lake.
“There’s a lot of land that’s devastated” in the area, Mamakwa told Newswatch in an interview Monday.
“It was very emotional for some of the leadership to see some of their camps (and) cabins burnt down … (because) being on the land is a way of life,” he said.
Mamakwa said as he was leaving the fly-in community he could see the fire and its destruction “all the way almost to Deer Lake, right? Like, it’s just all over.”
The Red Lake 12 fire first made news in late May when its rapid growth prompted evacuation from Deer Lake, southwest of Sandy Lake.
The fire expanded quickly again toward Sandy Lake, where an evacuation order was issued on June 7.
It has spread to more than 175,000 hectares, and the Ministry of Natural Resources reported on Monday evening that the fire is “not under control” but also not moving closer to either community.
Mamakwa said the strength of community and leadership in Sandy Lake was a key feature of his “eye-opening” visit to Sandy Lake, which is in the New Democrat’s expansive riding.
When his flight landed at Sandy Lake’s aerodrome, he said, he saw people there “taking vehicles back to the owners’ homes, and they were about halfway done. The parking lot was just full of vehicles. So that’s the first thing I noticed.”
The scene at the band office could be described as “organized chaos” as Chief Delores Kakegamic and many of the 200 or so people still in Sandy Lake were hard at work, Mamakwa said.
Red Lake 12’s damage and the huge fire’s proximity to the community were “very scary,” he said, but Sandy Lake First Nation was “very lucky” to have escaped significant damage to vital infrastructure and to have lost no lives to the fire.
“And I think it just speaks to the issues of climate change that we face every summer, and I think every community needs to have an evacuation plan for the summer.”
Mamakwa’s visit to Sandy Lake also included meeting with MNR firefighters.
Ontario needs “more firefighters on the ground” and more supports for wildfire-prone communities in the North, he said.
