GRAND PRAIRIE, ALBERTA — Addison McNeill had just put her bags down after moving to Jasper from Edmonton for her new job as a line cook when she got an alert on her phone that she needed to leave immediately.
"I moved there two hours before the evacuation notice," said the 24-year-old in an interview outside an evacuation centre in Grand Prairie, Alta.
McNeill said she picked up the three packed bags she came with to Jasper again and went to go to a nearby hotel, one of the two meet-up points she was directed to. That's where she hopped in an RV with others in town who didn't have a way to leave."Every single person in town was beelining to one exit from about six different routes and so you get bottleneck, backups and congestion.
"It was far from a panic. It was really actually nice to see given what could have been a very strong state of commotion." Evacuees were initially ordered to go to British Columbia but were directed on Tuesday to make a wide U-turn as that province was dealing with its own wildfires, proceeding north and east to Grande Prairie, or south to Kamloops before going east to Calgary.
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