Heartbreaking and moving first-person account by climate refugee Michael Nabert of his evacuation from Yellowknife, the capital city of Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada.
Nabert joined thousands of Yellowknife’s residents leaving the city on Highway 3, a two-lane highway, heading south to Alberta.
From The Road of Ashes:
And it’s not just the one city emptied.
Virtually every major settlement in the NWT is under an evacuation order now, covering about 70% of the total population stretched over the territories’ >1.3 million square kilometres.
For the town of Kakisa, burned out telecommunications infrastructure meant that when the order came, no one received it.
Now there’s an additional challenge for small isolated communities that remain, because they are used to getting groceries and other basic needs flown out by small planes from Yellowknife itself, which is the end of long highway supply chains.
Without the central distribution point operating, it’s a new logistical headache.
Photo credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.
