Residents displaced by wildfire race to rebuild in Denare Beach, Sask., before snow flies
CBC
Ask anyone in Denare Beach and they’ll tell you Rhonda Werbicki’s home was always the go-to Halloween house in the northern Saskatchewan village.
“We won't be here for Halloween this year, and that's killing me,” Werbicki said during a recent visit to Denare Beach. “I'm a huge decorator. I go all-out for Halloween.”
On June 2, wildfire destroyed Werbicki’s family home and more than 200 other residences in the remote lakeside community in northeast Saskatchewan, including 24 on the adjacent Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation reserve.
Werbicki currently lives with family about 750 kilometres away in Gimli, Man., but spent a couple of weeks in Denare Beach with her husband, who stayed behind to lead the massive effort to clear residential lots of debris.
“Every part of my life is 100 per cent different right now,” Werbecki said, lamenting the lack of routine, like meeting her girlfriends for coffee.
Talking about normal things — Halloween, the weather, the Toronto Blue Jays heading to the World Series — helps residents forget their abnormal circumstances. But it’s hard to escape the wildfire and its aftermath.
“I went to Costco last week and I'm totally fine, I'm shopping, and then I see the Christmas tree and I just started crying,” Werbicki said. “That emotion just comes to you. And I think you can ask anybody here; I think everybody's felt that.”
Christmas is her favourite holiday, but this year will be difficult, Werbicki said. She could be talking about her family or every family in Denare Beach that lost a home.
“My Christmas tree was always very eclectic, with different things that my kids made, or ornaments someone gave us for our wedding, and all of that's gone,” Werbicki said.
“It's going to be very hard, but I don't want to dwell there. I want to move on.”
Within weeks of evacuees returning to Denare Beach, crews began clearing debris and preparing lots for new homes. Locals are impressed with how quickly the townsite changed from charred piles of rubble to graded, serviced lots.
Crews hauled out up to 8,000 tandem truckloads of debris and hazardous material throughout the summer. Concrete and scrap metal left behind by the wildfire now sits in large piles waiting to be reused or hauled down south.
Brooke Kindel appreciates the massive effort to get lots ready for foundations and service lines. Her family spent the summer in temporary homes in Saskatoon and Creighton, the nearby border community where many Denare Beach residents ended up after the fire.
Like other families, the Kindels are racing against the weather to get the foundation poured to start rebuilding before the snow flies. Kindel said they’re building a large shop where they’ll park a camper trailer to live in until their new home is built.
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