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VOL. 28 NO. 4
Wednesday, May 18, 2016 - Terrace Stadard A1
S TaNDarD TERRACE
www.terracestandard.com
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Fort McMurray family settles in By CeCile Favron
CeCile Favron PHoTo
Lee and Jen Suurhoff and their two young children from Fort McMurray are temporarily calling Terrace home after a massive wildfire forced their evacuation from the northern alberta city two weeks ago.
For a family of four forced to flee the Fort McMurray wildfire earlier this month, the support they have received since arriving in Terrace has been overwhelming. Jen and Lee Suurhoff along with their two daughters Madelyn, 6, and reese, 2, will be staying with relatives in town until they are allowed to return to alberta and survey the damage done to their home. The pair, originally from Campbell river, say they are now working on getting settled in to everyday life in Terrace. It didn’t take long following their arrival before help from the community started pouring in. Jen was overwhelmed by the response to her social media postings. “My inbox has been flooded,” she said. “[By] the second day there were tonnes of people coming to drop off toys, clothes, food and even gift cards.” “Everyone here [has] really, really opened their arms,” Lee remarked. The Suurhoffs don’t yet know the fate of their house of three years in Fort McMurray and say that even as they were evacuating they weren’t prepared for what the fire would do to their community. “We were thinking ‘it won’t reach our house’ but by the time we left town we heard that the fire had come into our neighbourhood,” Jen said. “We know that [our house] is not burnt down, the structure is there. We’re thinking it got some water and smoke damage. Half of our street is gone – houses on our street have been com-
pletely burnt and we missed it by a few.” It’s the family’s first-ever stay in Terrace and they are living with Jen’s parents, andre and Emily Le Doux. as of late last week, 20 families in northern B.C. have registered with the Canadian red Cross. Lee, a heavy equipment operator, said they chose to come here so that their young children would have a place to stay while he returned to work. “once I found out how bad it was, I knew I’d be going back [to camp] quick-
er than we’d be going back to our home,” he explained. “So I at least wanted my family to be with family.” It is expected to take months before residents will be able to go back home again and so the Suurhoff family has chosen to enrol their eldest daughter in school. “We went to check out the school down the road because we weren’t sure if we were going to send her to school because that’s a lot of change for a six-year-old,” Jen said.
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Cullen leery of bid for NDP leadership SKEENa NDP MP Nathan Cullen says he’s leaning toward not taking a run at his party’s leadership. The long-serving MP whose name was immediately mentioned as a potential successor to Tom Mulcair when the NDP voted in favour of finding a new leader earlier this year, compared his thinking to that of the needle in the colour-coded scale used to indicate forest fire danger ratings. “right now I’d say I’d be in the orange leading to red,” said Cullen. First elected as the NDP MP for Skeena in 2004, Cullen’s national profile has increased steadily and he became well known when he finished a strong third in the last NDP leadership race in 2012. That was won by Mulcair who took the NDP into last fall’s election with high hopes of forming the next government. But the party fell to third place, sparking a leadership review vote resulting in the decision to replace Mulcair. The position itself doesn’t faze Cullen but if he does run and is elected as the leader of the federal NDP, he’s worried about how the job might affect his family. The Cullens have twin boys who will be six this summer and about to enter grade one. “That’s what gives me pause, the impact on my family and being what’s most important, a good parent,” he said. “I’d say that would be the single biggest concern right now,” he said. Cullen noted he already does a lot of travelling given his riding is among the largest in the country and is one of the farthest away from ottawa. and Cullen said he’d have to take into account what residents of Skeena, people he calls his “boss”, might have to say.
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Fighting cancer
Improving EI
Run in the family
Young mother battling aggressive form of leukemia \COMMUNITY A10
MP happy with Employment Insurance boost for the region \NEWS A9
Family group running a marathon together in their city of heritage \SPORTS A24