Dread, anxiety and too much chaos. What have we learned about evacuations for future wildfires?

From communication to finances, details around the evacuation of Yellowknife have been seen by many as a hodgepodge of measures meant to put order to chaos.

Evacuees and experts say the crisis has highlighted the need for emergency plans in natural disaster situations, the kind that displace large numbers of people within Canada and the kind that appear likely to become more common in a changing climate.

It’s time, some further argue, for a national emergency plan to be drawn up, as more communities — some remote, some not — find themselves under threat.

Robyn Scott, a teacher and artist who fled Yellowknife, said she’s relatively privileged with a good job. But she doesn’t know how she’s going to recover financially from the evacuation, especially if it lasts weeks.

Scott, her partner, her two kids and her two dogs are among more than 19,000 people who have fled the northern city as a raging wildfire about 15 kilometres away continues to threaten it.

Those people have spread out to hotels and evacuation centres across Western Canada with no answers around when they might be able to return home, and a confusing situation surrounding them.

“There’s an increasing sense of dread and anxiety, especially about the financial implications on our families,” Scott told the Star on Thursday.

She’s been put up in a Holiday Inn Express with other evacuees in the city of Leduc, just outside Edmonton.

Scott said appreciates the financial help by the city, and of donations, but that expenses are piling up after being gone for eight days.

“My kids needed warm clothes and we needed entertainment, and we need to go do activities,” she said. “As a single parent with a mortgage, even though I have a good career … I meticulously financially balance my life, and so I’m now forking out hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars over the next few weeks.”

Undoubtedly, Scott’s situation isn’t unique. More than two-thirds of the population of the entire territory has been displaced due to fires, and scores have taken to social media to voice concerns about the poor communication from the territorial government, lack of planning and need for financial assistance.

Others — evacuees in British Columbia who had been ordered to flee devastating fires there this month — took to the streets. The RCMP said Thursday that protesters hoped to “overwhelm” a wildfire blockade on the Trans-Canada Highway in British Columbia’s Shuswap region.

A small group of protesters there were frustrated by evacuation orders and wanted to return home, police said.

No such confrontations have been reported in the N.W.T., but frustration is bubbling among evacuees from there, too.

Robert Hawkins, a former member of the N.W.T. legislature, has been voicing concerns on social media about a lack of financial aid in particular. The territory has said it won’t reimburse people who obeyed evacuation orders, even though it put up money for those who waited a bit longer to flee by paying for flights out.

“It’s more than unfair,” Hawkins said. “There’s financial hardship … people still have mortgages to pay. People are not being employed. In other words, if you work at a private industry, you know, you’re not getting a paycheque. Costs continue to march on.”

Earlier this week, Finance Minister Caroline Wawzonek said the territorial government was still exploring ways to help on an ongoing basis, according to local news outlet Cabin Radio.

“I don’t have it right now, but we know that we’re going to need to do something,” Wawzonek told the outlet.

The N.W.T. does provide some income assistance for people out of work for more than seven days due to the evacuation, to the tune of $750.

But Hawkins said it seems like the territory is making policy up on the fly and, even though there have been several evacuations in the N.W.T. this year due to fires, hasn’t put together a real strategy.

He said he hopes there will be a no-fault inquiry afterward where all levels of government can review how things went.

For the time being, it’s provinces and municipalities — not to mention private citizens and fellow evacuees — who are stepping up to help each other.

While Hawkins, who is in Calgary, said he’s been offering to help evacuees, he’s been “particularly struck” by the number of folks asking him for financial help.

“It’s a reminder of how desperate some people really are,” he said. “They left with the shirts on their back, some of them. Some people had time to pack. Some people are low-income.”

Robert McLeman, an environment studies professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, said the worsening situation for N.W.T. evacuees was entirely foreseeable as the climate changes and the country sees extreme wildfires.

This year, it was mainly Halifax, Alberta, Kelowna, and the Northwest Territories, he said. But in 2021, it was Lytton, B.C., being burned down, and in 2016 it was Fort McMurray, Alta., that evacuated 88,000 people before a wildfire tore through that city.

“It’s inevitable. This is part of climate change. This is what it looks like in the Canadian context,” McLeman said.

“Are we well prepared for it? No, I think that’s one of the things we’ve learned this year, is that we’re very poorly prepared.”

According to Yellowknife evacuees, the order to leave within about 48 hours on Aug. 16 came out of nowhere after the territorial government dallied in its decision making. It was followed by little to no planning as thousands made their way south using the only road in or out. The roughly 14-hour trip to Edmonton sometimes took people twice as long on the barren stretch of highway with little cell reception and sparse spots to buy essentials.

Many scrambled to figure out where to go; some thought they had to go to Calgary, others thought just as far as High Level, 10 hours north of that city.

Yellowknife resident Michael Ewen, who is on sick leave from his job in the N.W.T., is in Fox Creek, Alta., as of Thursday. The evacuation itself was “an unplanned mess,” he said, and the sudden evacuation order eventually led to chaos on the road.

It wasn’t until well after thousands had fled that the territorial government got information about evacuation centres up online, said Ewen.

Ewen said the N.W.T. should have set up some sort of command centre in High Level — which acts like a hub between the territory and Alberta — where officials could have directed people driving through.

“Because there was no direction given (by the territory) people just sort of went everywhere and we weren’t equally distributed based on what the communities could support,” he said.

McLeman, the Wilfrid Laurier professor, said the federal government should set up an office in Ottawa for a federal emergency co-ordinator to work with all the provinces, territories and municipalities across Canada on an emergency plan. The United States has one entity — FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency — that directs the country’s response to disasters.

Calling the governmental responses to wildfires this year the “fly by the seat of our pants” strategy, McLeman said the big takeaway of the summer should be ensuring there’s a blueprint in place next summer when wildfires happen again.

We need to make sure we have the firefighting resources and “contingency funds to help people to financially recover from this,” he said.

That responsibility should be shared by Ottawa, he said.

Meanwhile, the wildfires this year should also underline the need for action on the changing climate, said McLeman.

“None of us is exempt from any of this,” he said. “It could be your community next week, or next year.”