“By noon, we had been called down to Mac Island, and that afternoon most of us were busy getting supplies to firefighters, evacuating some patients at the hospital to the airstrip at Firebag, north of town, and moving senior citizens down to Mac Island,” Hansen says. “We stayed at Mac Island till about 9 that evening, then got the word to leave there and went back to our shops at Gregoire. By this time the fire had spread to the Thickwood area—Abasand was gone, Beacon Hill was gone, golf course. It was just surreal. You could see the flames dancing in front of you—once you saw the flames, it was real.” Di Bartolomeo was running his regular route on the Tuesday of the evacuation, but that evening was spent running a shuttle service from the downtown area to the bus barns on Airport Road, evacuating people to the muster point. “A couple of my colleagues had lost their homes, and to see that was very painful,” he says. “Normally, I’m the guy that would make positive of the situation, but this was very difficult to find a positive outlook.” By late Wednesday and into Thursday, Fort McMurray was virtually deserted and the transit workers were all regrouped in Lac La Biche, where they quickly took over much of the Apex campground, establishing kitchen facilities and a staging area for the bus fleet. For much of May, the transit department was tasked with a variety of duties, including moving evacuees out to Edmonton, bringing supplies back to Lac La Biche and rotating first responders in and out of Fort McMurray as needed. Occasionally, the department would be put on notice to evacuate nearby communities, and in one instance it managed to put a fleet of 23 buses and support vehicles on the road inside of 10 minutes to evacuate Janvier, 180 kilometres northeast of Lac La Biche on Highway 881. That turned out to be a false alarm. Finally, in late May, much of the department was recalled to Fort McMurray, ahead of the general re-entry, which was set to begin June 1. Once re-entry started, Wood Buffalo established a rudimentary shuttle service to take returning evacuees into opened communities, but it was the middle of July before Hansen, O’Doherty, Di Bartolomeo and Nagi were able to return to any kind of a life resembling normal. A stressful six or eight weeks, to be sure, but an experience that Di Bartolomeo, at least, would not have passed up. “All the females in my family, aunts, my mother, my sisters—they were always telling me to come home. But there was too much to do and an opportunity to help people, and I wasn’t going to pass up that chance. It’s a
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