'That looks terrifying': Residents of Cranberry Portage share brushes with wildfire amid evacuation
CBC
Residents of Cranberry Portage scrambled to leave their homes Saturday night as a massive out-of-control wildfire near Flin Flon moved toward the area.
A forest fire 38 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide has moved within one kilometre of Cranberry Portage, located southeast of Flin Flon, the province said in its fourth fire bulletin on Sunday afternoon.
"When we woke up, the whole town was completely covered in smoke, it was smoky outside, you could smell the fire, ashes were falling from the sky," said Bailey Anderson.
"So we're just waiting to hear what was going on when the sirens started going off and they had patrol officers telling people that they need to leave immediately."
The wildfire has also caused intermittent power outages, with Manitoba Hydro's outage map showing just under 800 people affected by outages in the area around Cranberry Portage as of 6 p.m. Sunday.
Keith Jaeger, 24, was out quadding Saturday night and while it was getting dark outside, he said the sky started to get brighter as he neared Cranberry Portage.
Video sent to CBC News by Jaeger shows flames off in the distance over First Cranberry Lake. It also shows the smoke-filled sky as he drove on Highway 10 toward The Pas.
WATCH | Massive out-of-control-wildfire that led to evacuation:
"It's definitely scary initially because you see it in videos and stuff like that, it doesn't look as big as it is," he said. "It's an experience you don't have to see something of that size and that magnitude."
His thoughts are also with the first responders currently battling the blaze.
"That looks terrifying, even from afar it looks terrifying," he said.
"I couldn't imagine going in there and doing that type of work, they're doing really important stuff in there, saving communities and stuff like that, saving people's livelihood."
Other Cranberry Portage residents like Debbie Sinclair described the flames as something they'd never seen before.
"It was unbelievable, I've never seen anything like it," said Sinclair from a hotel room in Thompson Sunday.
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