City welcomes Cat Lake fire evacuees

News — 20 July 2011

Dryden Mayor Craig Nuttall, declared a state of emergency at 4:20 p.m. on July 18 to ensure that the city has access to all necessary resources to support evacuees from Cat Lake First Nation.

The night of July 18, approximately 70 residents from Cat Lake arrived at the Dryden Municipal Airport and were bussed to the Dryden High School for temporary lodging due to the smoke and power outage-caused evacuation of their community.

Nuttall said, “We’re (the city of Dryden) part of the emergency team and we have an emergency task force set up. We were on the conference calls twice a day, and they were looking for places to evacuate some of the First Nations people.”

“What we’re doing is putting them into the high school, and there is approximately 80 male people coming,” said Nuttall.

Dryden’s Emergency Control Group was assembled at 4 p.m. on July 18 to implement plans to receive through the Stage 2 Evacuation Process. Stage 1 was inclusive of children, elderly, and sickly individuals. Stage 2 is a complete evacuation.

“Everything is arranged, the Red Cross has cots there, and we have our emergency team doing everything we possibly can, the Legion and some other places will do the catering,” said Nuttall.

“With declaring an emergency like this, everything is paid for by the Federal and Provincial Governments. The citizens of Dryden are not out of pocket,” said Nuttall.

The time frame of the evacuation is undetermined at this time, considering the level of smoke in the far north, as well as the threat of the fires themselves. Cat Lake has already evacuated 140 residents to Kapuskasing and 108 residents to Matachewan.

Nuttall says there could still be more evacuees coming, dependent on the situation in the north.

“If they evacuate, say 5,000, we’ll probably have to look at the arena and places like that, but right now we can handle 80. We want to make sure that they’re comfortable because they are away from their homes,” said Nuttall.

The mayor reported that the public works department for the city is on board with assistance, along with leadership provided by Linda McNaughton and assistance available from the municipal telephone company.

By Ally Dunham

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