'I didn't think I was gonna make it,' says Brandon construction worker who survived northern Ontario wildfire
CBC
A construction worker who huddled with his crew inside a smoky shipping container as a northern Ontario wildfire encircled them said he's happy to be alive and back home with his family in Brandon, about 215 kilometres west of Winnipeg.
The 19-person crew, made up of employees from Sigfusson Northern, a Winnipeg-based construction company, and Milestone Environmental Contracting Inc., a contracting and construction company with headquarters in Langley, about 50 kilometres southeast of Vancouver, had been working at a job site for a project near Sandy Lake First Nation, a fly-in community located about 600 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay.
Every worker in the crew, except for one, was from Manitoba.
As the work day began, Carl Genaille told his co-workers he was worried that the Red Lake 12 wildfire was getting close to their camp.
That fire was more than 156,000 hectares in size and was still out of control, according to Ontario's wildfire map on Monday night.
"I told them this fire is gonna be here real quick because I could see the smoke was really black and then orange and it was mixed together," Genaille said in an interview with CBC News on Monday.
"The wind was blowing really hard, man, like really hard," he said.
The fire was about 40 kilometres from the site early Saturday morning, site superintendent Neal Gillespie told CBC on Saturday night. He said conditions got worse around 9:30 a.m. and the crew began packing up.
Genaille, a former firefighter, told his crew they had to leave. Then the fire closed in.
"We had nowhere to go in that camp area and the fire burned right around it, full blast," he said.
He tried to get away from the fire by sheltering in a shipping container, and the rest of the crew followed him inside. The sea can was filled with thick smoke, but the fire outside was worse, he said.
In a terrifying video posted to social media by his daughter Anika, Genaille can be heard telling co-workers to be careful as orange, tree-height flames roared just metres away.
"I was scared and I didn't think I was gonna make it," he said. "But I just accepted it and started helping out the guys and calming them down."
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