Evacuating amid smoke and flames

Wildfires threaten homes, pets, lives near Halifax

In the midst of her vows on Sunday, Ellen MacPhee looked up to a hot pink sun and an unearthly and smoky sky, and to the black ash falling onto her white wedding dress.

“It was just a surreal feeling — I kept on saying that,” she said Tuesday. “It’s like you’re seeing this different world. I just kept thinking it’s like I’m in a dream and I’m going to wake up and tell my husband, ‘I just had the craziest dream about our wedding.’ ”

The smoke, the ash and the psychedelic sun were all courtesy of the wildfire that, at that moment, was rapidly scorching the area around Tantallon, 23 kilometres northwest of Halifax. Flames that spread to encompass 788 hectares would eventually cause some 16,000 residents of subdivisions in the area to flee their homes amid three separate evacuation orders.

As of Tuesday, at least 200 homes and structures had been damaged by the fire. That number was expected to grow pending surveys of the burned areas.

An emergency alert sounded in the midst of the ceremony.

The reception was cancelled and MacPhee, her two-month-old son and her guests became evacuees.

“I’m just so thankful that nothing happened,” MacPhee said. “So thankful that the fire didn’t reach the farm when we had all those guests there … I couldn’t even imagine that.

“I just feel so bad for the people who have lost their homes. We lost a wedding. That’s fine. We can always do that again.”

For some evacuees — like the Brousseau family — the homes they hurriedly left behind now exist in a kind of Schrödinger’s cat box, hypothetically in two states simultaneously — untouched and razed to the ground — while they await a phone call from authorities with news good or bad.

The Brousseaus’ Sunday began with church and then a trip to the park on with their 10-month-old bull mastiff puppy, Mya. “We had a beautiful day. Mya went in the water. We enjoyed the sun,” Michelle Brousseau said.

In the early afternoon, they headed home. Sean, her husband, noticed some smoke as they approached their subdivision in Hammonds Plains and at one point they had to pull over for a speeding fire truck, but they didn’t think too much about it.

After some time though, she said, she noticed the sky looked strange outside her window.

“I looked outside and the sun was blood red,” Michelle said. “And then my son called me … he’d heard about the fire in Tantallon and wanted to make sure we were OK.”

As she spoke to her son, an emergency alert came across her phone.

“It was getting dark and smoky and ashes were flying, coming down and everybody was leaving their homes and the panic was just incredible,” Michelle said.

“You don’t think that you’re not going to come back to your home, right? You think that you’re going to come back. You don’t realize that (you might not come back) at all. And my heart goes out to the people who don’t have a home to go to.”

They know, from conversations with their neighbours, of streets around their house that are completely gone.

But the fate of their own home remained in the balance, waiting for the call to tell them.

Grace Smith has gotten that call. When the number came up private on her caller ID, her heart sank. She was sure it meant that her home had been destroyed and her two parrots, Captain Marty III Esq. and Major Theodore Spaghetti along with it.

On police advice, Smith called 911 and told them she had pets in the evacuation zone. But as they waited on the side of the road, as the hours wore on and as they watched the sky go dark with smoke and the sun turn red, hope turned to a feeling of loss.

“I really broke down at that point. I didn't think I was ever going to see them again. And they’re my whole life,” Smith said.

When the call came for Smith, however, it was police asking how they could get in to rescue her parrots.

“When they called back that second time, I heard Theo screaming his head off in the background,” said Smith. “And I've never been so happy to hear him scream like that in my entire life because I knew he was alive.”

A few hours after speaking with the Star, Michelle and Sean Brousseau got their call, too.

“Just found out nothing damaged on Northwood Road!” Michelle texted.

‘‘ You think that you’re going to come back. You don’t realize that (you might not come back) at all. And my heart goes out to the people who don’t have a home to go to.

MICHELLE BROUSSEAU WHO WAS EVACUATED