It was like the opening scene out of the zombie series The Walking Dead when Kelly Cardinal finally made it to the safety of the open road. Vehicles lay askew every which way on the wide medians and shoulders of Highway 63 that led out of flaming Fort McMurray.
Cars and trucks were parked helter-skelter, doors left wide open, tailgates down, abandoned.
“Just no one there, for miles,” he said. “It was crazy.”
That and other memories have been seared into Cardinal’s memory as he joined thousands as they fled the raging wildfire, named the Beast, that devoured the northern Alberta city last week.
Cardinal, from Maple Ridge, was in the middle of his work day as a dog groomer when he noticed the sky growing dark on May 3.
He stuck his head outside and saw people running everywhere and planes flying overhead. He knew he had to get out of the Fort McMurray suburb he was in and join the rest of the 80,000 people heading on to Hwy. 63, now a lifeline.
But the inner city roads were in gridlock and a short drive to the highway that would normally have taken 10 or 15 minutes was now a slow-motion nightmare that took hours as flames roared into the sky.
Cardinal was stuck in the Abasand subdivision, the first to be engulfed. His girlfriend, Rachel Hird-Rutter, was in their home in Timberlea, on the other side of town.
Neither could get to Hwy. 63, which would lead them out of town from what would become hell on earth.
“It was gridlock,” Cardinal said.
They briefly tried to flee north out of town, towards the oil sands, then changed their minds, and joined the majority heading south towards Edmonton.
But Cardinal had a problem. His Ford F-150 pickup, which towed the trailer from which he ran his business, was low on gas.
As he sat there motionless, he thought about bailing out of his truck and running for his life.
He managed to drive to a downtown gas station, but within five minutes, the pumps had run dry. He left his truck and work trailer there and grabbed a ride with a friend and rejoined the agonizing creep to the safety of the highway and out of town.
“People were riding their horses, running with their animals … it was like a movie, it was crazy.”
While Cardinal stalled in traffic, Hird-Rutter had an earlier start. She been sent home earlier that day with the company truck, freshly gassed up, thanks to her employer.
But with Cardinal stranded on the other side of the hill, she didn’t want to leave. It got to the point, she wanted him to run downhill from the suburb and get on to the highway.
Meanwhile, Cardinal was telling her to just get out.
“I told her just go south, go south.”
But Hird-Rutter also had to endure the creeping traffic, while flames crept at her back as she made a break for Hwy. 63.
It was an eternity before she got her pickup, packed with her two dogs Piper and Linden, along with cat Mia and ferret Jinks, on to the highway.
“We’re like sitting ducks,” she remembers thinking.
“It’s not very far, maybe five kilometres, but it took us hours. You look in the rear-view mirror and you’re just seeing the smoke getting close. I was just heading that way with my animals. The side of the road was on fire.”
Hird-Rutter didn’t realize how close and dangerous the fire was until seeing the flames. The air temperature gauge in her truck said 48 C and the air conditioning had stopped working.
Hird-Rutter said the only public warning she heard was the emergency tones the local radio station broadcast. But that only lasted for 45 minutes, after which the stations went off the air and began playing a repetitious selection of songs.
Once she got close to the highway, people started abandoning the rules of the road and began driving on both sides of the highway, six lanes, to escape the inferno.
The pair reunited in Grassland, safely away from the flames.
“It took 11 hours to get there. It’s a two and a half hour drive,” Cardinal said.
They’re now resting with family in Maple Ridge, but waiting to get back.
Their rental home is still standing, they’ve been told. That could have been because of the large empty space of the nearby baseball diamond kept the flames from the house.
But other houses in the suburb were just steps away from the forest, with no buffer areas between homes and forest.
It was a scary thing to go through, Cardinal said, adding that police and firefighters did their best getting people out, and for that he is thankful.
“It’s something I’ve never experienced before,” added Hird-Rutter.
Her construction company has told her it will be a while, but work will pick up.
Cardinal wants to get back and help in the rebuild. Fort McMurray has been good to him.
When he left Maple Ridge five years ago, he was in debt. There he had a thriving business.
“It’s done so much for me, my business and my life. It’s my town.”