Mandatory and voluntary: How Sask. residents are grappling with wildfire evacuations

WATCH: While some Saskatchewan communities are still planning full evacuations, others are heading home to assess the damage.

As some residents are returning home after dodging wildfire threats – others are still in limbo, waiting to see if they will be forced to evacuate amid a worsening fire season in Saskatchewan.

There are currently 33 evacuation orders in place across the province.

These mandates range from full evacuations – which require all community members to leave, to voluntary evacuations – where residents are asked to leave if they have an alternate residence.

“By voluntary evacuating, it means there’s less people that we have to be concerned about. Less people that we have to province services to, and more time to do things like we’re doing right now,” Brent Lutz explained. He serves as the chief administrative officer of the resort village of Candle Lake.

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Candle Lake is one of several communities currently under a voluntary evacuation. The community received some rainfall over the weekend. The dash of precipitation provided some relief – but the nearby Shoe and Ditch Fires remain as looming threats.

Lutz shared that the crews within the community are using this window of time to be proactive in terms of mitigating risks.

“We’re literally going house to house where nobody is residing right now and identifying how we can make their yards safer in advance of a possible fire entering the village,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the reopening of the road from Smeaton to Pelican Narrows means that those who have evacuated from that area can return home.

“The [community] leadership will work our command team to look at the threat, if it’s increasing, if it’s decreasing, and based on that, they’ll make a decision on whether they think their community is gonna be better off to evacuate or continue to stay and be on alert,” Steve Roberts, the vice president of operations for the SPSA said in a press conference on Monday.

While those with their own vehicles are free to travel back to Pelican Narrows, anyone with a health condition is advised to hold off on their return.

The issue of poor air quality and lack of medical resources in evacuated communities will still take some time to solve before conditions improve.

“We wanna make sure that the critical infrastructure like water and sewer are in place,” Public Safety Minister Tim McLeod said Monday.

“Certainly, when people return home, we wanna make sure they’re returning to communities where they have the services they need, where they have groceries and things like that.”