“You need to turn your truck around and get the F out of here right now.” When Cody Townend looks back on 2023’s evacuation, he remembers how getting out made him fear for his life.
Cody was born and raised in Hay River.
A small-town guy, Cody spent his childhood biking around town with friends, playing hockey in the streets long after dark, and working summers at the local hardware store, Beaver Lumber. Cody is now the manager of that store, which has since been bought out by Home Hardware.
Hay River’s close-knit community was like family, as neighbours helped to raise one another’s children. Now, as the father of a 13-year-old son, Cody still counts on that kindness.
He lives in a newly-renovated three bedroom trailer home on a corner lot with his eight-year-old husky labrador, Shadow, and his son during the school year.
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After experiencing a flood evacuation in May 2022 and a fire evacuation in May 2023, Hay River was returning to a sense of normalcy when that year’s August forest fire threatened the town.
Here is Cody Townend’s account, as told to Linnea Burke.
I was just sitting at home with my dog, enjoying my time. It was a Sunday, so us as a business were closed. A lot of businesses are closed on a Sunday.
Word was getting around that something was going on, without anything being publicly announced yet. There was people rushing to get gas at 10am or 11am. When I first started getting wind of it, I wasn’t really in a big panic mode. The fires would have been 40 kilometres from town at that point.
It’s starting to get pretty smoky and dark. The sun should be out, it should be clear blue skies. It was starting to look like nighttime in the middle of the day. About 2:30pm, 3pm is when the actual evacuation went out on the phones. It was an extremely windy day. The fire covered something like 30 to 40 kilometres in a couple of hours.
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The panic might have started setting in with me a little bit, like, ‘Oh shit, this is getting more serious than what I thought.’ I had friends come over. My mom was coming down the street, just trying to get everything organized, figuring out what everybody’s going to do. You don’t know what to pack, how long are you going to be gone for. I was able to finally start leaving here a couple of hours after the initial public evacuation.
By that time the sky’s red, dark, smoky, almost like a big glow. There’s ashes, stuff falling around your vehicle, on your vehicle. You smell nothing but smoke: like when you’re standing by a fire and the smoke’s getting in your face and you say white rabbit. It was just ash and fire.
There’s a lineup of people leaving town. There was a chopper maybe 40 or 50 feet above my vehicle, and there was more than one. I’ll never forget that chopper being way lower than he should have been. I felt like I was driving towards the fire. I got around a corner, and there was about eight or 10 vehicles. At that point, it’s pitch black. I can clearly see the fire.
A guy came up, had his window rolled down. I remember saying, “Are we able to go?” He said, “No, not a chance.” He kept going, and then some type of government officer came by and rolled his window down. He said, “Excuse me, sir. You need to turn your truck around and get the F out of here right now.”
Now I’m panicking. We’re bumper to bumper. Thank God, all the vehicles were able to back up and turn around on that highway because five minutes later, that corner was pretty-much gone. If we weren’t out of there in the time we did, we would have been leaving our vehicles and running out of there.
I’ve never been in a situation like that before, where I was fearing for my life. I was ready to call my kid, call my family members. I remember having a 20-minute nap four days later. I had a dream where I was trying to get out of somewhere, being chased by a fire. I knew it affected me a bit mentally. Still does.
I remember driving back for about two minutes, and I pulled out to the side. A guy I knew that was there was like, “Cody, I’m going to grab my boat. I’m throwing my boat in the water. If you need, grab your dog, come down here. We’ll go into the middle of the water if we have to.” It was that type of panic situation.
As soon as we started talking, power and cell service went out. We’re hearing from word of mouth to go to the airport. They’re going to start evacuating people out on planes, because that’s the only way out since the highway is on fire.
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I didn’t go to the airport right away because I was on the phone with my cousin Jay. He’s one of the maintenance directors at the hospital. They were getting patients medevaced out. He’s like, “There’s going to be hundreds of people there right now trying to fly out. Priorities are going to be seniors. We’re two younger guys, probably not going to get out right away.”
I remember coming to the store. I grabbed every single fricking N95 mask I had. I grabbed every respirator, paint mask, anything I could find that we might need if we did get stuck out on a boat. We were with another person that owned the IDA, the drug store here. We had no idea what was going to happen moving forward. We just stuck together and hung out for the night.
There was four or five people that I usually don’t hang out with, but that’s who I ended up with, and they were my friends for the next six to seven hours. That’s how you have to be in a time like that. I had my cousin, but some people got left by themselves and had nobody.
We were cooking something at like 2am because none of us ate yet. I remember getting up and going for drives every half an hour just to make sure, because you’re not getting any updates on your phone. You’re nervous. All of our family members who made it out have no idea we are safe. All they know is we didn’t make it out, so they’re thinking the worst.
It was 3am and my phone got service. I found out that one business had Starlink. I had 87 text messages, 20-some missed calls, 15 to 20 Facebook messages. People wondering where I am, if I’m OK. I remember sitting there for about a half an hour, trying to answer the important ones, to let them know that we’re OK and Shadow, the dog, was OK.
Then I drove through town. You’d find people sitting in their front yards, some people having drinks, some just hanging out. Everybody was pretty calm about the fire not making it any more towards town. How they knew that, I’m not too sure. Seeing people not stressed helped me a little bit. I went home. I wanted to try and sleep. I dozed off and on for a couple hours.
I ended up getting up and going to my cousin Jay’s house and woke him up. We decided we were going to go meet at the airport and see what was going on for the day because they’re going to be chartering flights every couple hours. I was trying to find a kennel for my dog, because that’s the only way they were taking animals.
10:15am is when we decided we’re not going to jump on a plane. About 10:30am, that last plane left. I was just going to wait because I’d rather drive out, have my truck, better for my dog. The people I was with, they seemed OK sticking around for a little bit.
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I was driving in the area here to go use someone else’s Starlink again. As I was doing that, I’d seen a couple of highway guys filling up their trucks at the highway yard and I knew them. I drove by to see how things were going. They’re like, “Cody, there’s three or four of us. We’re hitting the highway in like half an hour. We’re told right now, it’s good.” These are highway vehicles with lights on them. They were going to guide us through everything.
I happened to be at the right place at the right time. I ran home. I got everything ready, packed up my dog. I gave one of the firefighters the keys to the store and the keys to the lumber yard because I knew they were going to be needing stuff. I remember stopping at my cousin Jay’s house. I let him know what was going on. He was on board too.
I met those guys about two minutes out of town. The highway trucks at the front were guiding us through because it was devastation leaving. There’s vehicles all over the place. There’s even one or two points where we barely got through the debris on the highway. It was so bad.
He guided us to Enterprise, where the fire came from. Going through was heartbreaking. There was still fires going off in the back bushes. You’re driving by big buildings that were there a couple days ago and it’s just shell. Winnie’s, a famous restaurant that’s out there, burnt to the ground. The gas station was OK, but the hotel right behind the gas station was gone.
Getting through, finally seeing the blue clear sky, was just such a relief. I felt safe. I felt OK at that point. It was two full days of no sleep, panic, stress. I was exhausted. My body was done. My mind was done. When you’re running on adrenaline and you’re in panic like that, you don’t even realize. I probably shouldn’t have been driving as much as I did to get to Grande Prairie, but I’m glad we got there and we were safe and with the rest of our family. I shut my phone off and I slept for like 12, 14 hours.
There was a lot of help. High Level, Manning, Grande Prairie, pretty much every little town you hit going south had something set up for free coffee to hang out and just relax if you had to. Everyone did a really good job at looking after the evacuees and opening up their places and their hearts. I ended up getting a hotel room through the evacuation, all paid for. The day we were evacuated was August 13. Tuesday, September 26, is when I finally rolled back into town. Five weeks in total, I believe.
Driving back and seeing the devastation was not as emotional as leaving, but it was close. When you’re driving up to Hay River, it’s just trees and forest. Now it’s just burnt twigs everywhere. It’s one big barren open land. You look at the land and it’s something we’re going to be reminded of for the next 20, 30 years. It’s something I’d prefer to forget, but I’m not ever going to forget.
We didn’t lose any structures in town that I know of. I think a cabin was lost. Definitely a different story outside of town. People lost their houses. They lost their farm buildings. They lost their animals. They lost everything. There are some pretty horrific stories of what they went through out there, where they spent the night down by the banks, by the water, just praying they’d make it to the next day.
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Mother Nature is a funny beast. What she wants to do, she does it, and there’s nothing you can really do about it. I have a newfound respect for fire and how fast it moves. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and it’s scary. If you are ever in that situation, respect Mother Nature and get out of there.
It opens your eyes up because, before our flood, I think the last major disaster here was back in either the 50s or 60s. I’m not too familiar with climate change. I know it. I believe it’s out there. I’ve witnessed it here in the last five years. It’s happening all over. A place goes through a flood, and then a year or two later, that exact same place is going through some type of fire or vice versa. Things are changing. We’re not getting as much snow up here. The rain the last few years has been minimal. Last summer, you were able to jet boat up to the falls. This year, you can’t even get halfway because we have no water in our waterways.
I guess my hope would be we never have to go through that again. If something’s already burned, it’s not going to burn again. That’s morbid, but you know. If something does happen like that again, I’m pretty confident our town will come together again to get through it like we have in the past. It makes me feel good that we are a strong community.
I hope we can learn things from these evacuations. Climate change is a big part of these natural disasters. My hope is that we get more knowledge of it and learn how to prevent these things from even happening. I don’t know how many more disasters our little town can go through up here.
This testimony was co-created by members of the Climate Disaster Project. The project is an international teaching newsroom that works with disaster-affected communities to document and investigate their stories. For more information, please visit www.climatedisasterproject.com.
From Tuesday: Walking the path to recovery a year on from the Enterprise wildfire
From Wednesday: ‘People never imagined a climate disaster in Yellowknife’
From Friday: ‘I’m emotional talking about the little kindnesses’