The devastating Jasper wildfire has taken a toll on its 'sister community,' Hinton, Alta. Here's how

The signs are everywhere in Hinton, Alta., from hotel parking lots packed with restoration crew trucks to letter boards welcoming evacuees.

"Jasper neighbours, our hearts are with you," read one multicoloured sign belonging to a flooring business.

Since July 22, when a destructive wildfire forced the evacuation of 25,000 residents and visitors from Jasper National Park, Hinton has increasingly become a life-raft for the nearby mountain community.

At first, it was firefighters, emergency responders, disaster recovery workers and members of the armed forces who arrived in the town about 300 kilometres west of Edmonton, to grapple with the fire that destroyed one third of structures in Jasper on July 24, and the blaze's immediate aftermath. About 1,000 people streamed into the town's 1,300 hotel rooms, and set up camps and command posts in fields, parking lots and an arena.

WATCH | How the wildfires in Jasper are changing life in Hinton, Alta.: 

A year after welcoming wildfire evacuees from the Edson area, Hinton was bracing itself to play host to Jasperites, Hinton Mayor Nicholas Nissen said in an interview last month.

"Everyone's response books had all of the evacuees arriving in Hinton, and that didn't happen," Nissen said.

But with fire and smoke obscuring highways south and east out of Jasper, most of the evacuees were shepherded west, to Valemount, B.C.

Highway 16 was closed just east of Jasper National Park to the B.C. border for about three weeks, kneecapping a key transportation and economic corridor for Hinton during the height of tourist season.

"The visitor economy took a large hit and it's just starting to come back now," Tyler Waugh, executive director of the Hinton Chamber of Commerce, said last week.

And by mid-August, when the emergency workers left and Jasperites were allowed back home, Hinton began to fill up with folks whose Jasper homes and businesses were damaged and destroyed — along with crews of workers tasked with cleaning smoke and ash from buildings, restoring gas and power, and other recovery tasks.

With the spectre of debris removal and reconstruction on the horizon and limited places to stay in Jasper, Nissen says the peak influx of people into Hinton is likely still to come.

"We can expect to see more and more people arriving and spending more and more time here," he said of the town of 10,000 people, which is about 80 kilometres northeast of Jasper.

Mac de Beaudrap, Hinton fire chief, says Jasper, which has about 5,000 residents, is Hinton's "sister community."