Jenpeg employees evacuated
The wildfire threat in the northern part of the province has prompted the evacuation of Manitoba Hydro's Jenpeg generating station.
The precautionary evacuation occurred late Wednesday afternoon when an advancing 3,290-hectare out-of-control wildfire reached a point five kilometres away.
'All Manitoba Hydro employees have safely left the area,' Peter Chura, spokesman for the publicly owned power utility, said Thursday.
The 174-megawatt facility constructed in 1972 and completed in 1979 has been undergoing maintenance and was not generating electricity, so there is no effect on customers, Chura said.
Normal staffing at Jenpeg — located where the west channel of the Nelson River flows into Cross Lake, about 135 km south of Thompson — is close to 30 people, he said. Its powerhouse and spillway structures are also used to regulate about 85 per cent of the water flowing out of Lake Winnipeg.
All hydro employees have safely been moved from any areas under evacuation orders, he noted.
The fire forced the evacuation of the nearby Pimicikamak Cree Nation; residents were among more than 17,000 people evacuated from several northern communities, including the City of Flin Flon and Town of Lynn Lake and the Mathias Colomb First Nation.
Pointe du Bois and Slave Falls generating stations have returned to routine operations and staffing levels, Chura said. On May 14, Manitoba Hydro announced the imminent evacuation of workers from those two stations on the Winnipeg River as wildfires threatened to cut off road access.
'We continue to monitor the situation in case it changes, or new fire starts are observed,' Chura said. 'Power is mostly restored from wildfire-related outages in eastern Manitoba except for part of Nopiming, which is de-energized as a safety precaution due to fires in the area.
He said fire and smoke conditions are currently preventing hydro from assessing damage or restoration of power outages — likely fire-related — in several communities.
Out of firefighters, looking abroad
The Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre has called on its international partners for backup as Canada has run out of wildland firefighters.
As of Thursday afternoon, every wildland firefighter and resource in Canada was spoken for due to increased fire activity across the country.
'We just raised the national preparedness level from a Level 4 to a Level 5 — which is the highest level — and essentially what that means is that all Canadian firefighting resources that are otherwise available have all now been committed,' said Alex Jones, the acting communications manager at CIFFC.
The non-profit is owned and operated by the federal, provincial and territorial governments. It co-ordinates and allocates wildfire resources across Canada and, when called upon, internationally.
Manitoba currently has personnel from Alberta, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Parks Canada, as well as support personnel from CIFFC itself, but still have more requests for help in the queue.
CIFFC must now ask for help from outside partners, such as the U.S., Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Costa Rica, Portugal, Chile and France.
Response to that call is based on availability and how quick help can get here.
Jones couldn't say whether Manitoba would accept help from the U.S. amid current cross-border trade tensions.
'We do have a really strong, really long-standing agreement with the United States. It's been in place since 1982 and we just re-sign the agreement this spring and so right now essentially it's business as usual and they're ready to support if they can,' she said. 'We try and maintain those relationships with fire as much as possible because at the end of the day, public safety is No. 1.'
At a Wednesday news conference, Premier Wab Kinew wouldn't comment on whether the province would ask its neighbours to the south for additional resources.
Mining company lends hand
A Toronto-based mining company operating in northern Manitoba is working to ensure its employees remain safe.
Hudbay Minerals Inc. has ongoing care and maintenance activities in Flin Flon following the closure of the 777 mine in 2022 as well as services to support its Snow Lake operations, the company said in a news release Thursday afternoon.
The company is securing additional accommodations in Snow Lake for its evacuated employees and their families; deploying trained emergency personnel to aid firefighting efforts; maintaining communication with local communities and provincial authorities about the resources it has available to support emergency-response efforts; and providing facility infrastructure information to assist with planning and response.
Hudbay is continuing operations in Snow Lake, approximately 200 kilometres east of Flin Flon, and expects temporary reduced production levels, as a large portion of its workforce lives in Flin Flon.
Hudbay is a copper-focused critical minerals mining company with three long-life operations and a pipeline of copper growth projects in Canada, Peru and the United States.
— Compiled by Nicole Buffie, Carol Sanders and Aaron Epp
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