Western Standard - May 08, 2023


Smith calls in military to help with wildfires

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Arthur Nigel Rothschild Enwistle
AB REPORT： FACT CHECK - NDP’s “87B” Net zero AB REPORT： UCP safe streets plan & - Notley’s promise to establish Lethbridge Teaching Clinic

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

160.57

Word count

680

Sentence count

48

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Join us as we talk about the devastating fires that have ravaged Alberta over the past few days. In this episode, we talk to a man who was lucky enough to escape one of the most devastated areas of the fire zone, Drayton Valley.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 On Friday evening, I headed to Drayton Valley and, of course, all the roads were closed, headed in there. I was able to get through to roadblocks with my press ID. And, you know, it was a bit airy driving into a town that's completely on fire. Everybody's going one way and I'm driving the other.
00:00:24.040 But, you know, I was in Drayton Valley. The town was completely empty. All was left was RCMP officers, firemen, of course, and forster units.
00:00:35.300 At the time you were there, Arthur, how close to Drayton Valley were the flames?
00:00:39.740 The flames were actually right in Drayton Valley. I mean, at one point I was about 700 meters from one of the fires and you can feel the heat on your face and smell the smoke.
00:00:53.640 I mean, my car permanently smells like a bonfire now, but it was moving pretty quickly.
00:00:59.600 And at one point, you know, an officer said to me, you're crazy to be here.
00:01:05.220 And I agreed with him, but I was just worried that the that the wind was going to change and then I wouldn't get out.
00:01:11.760 But I did manage to get out. Of course, there was no power in the area and no gas stations open.
00:01:18.380 I did have a full tank of gas when I left. Of course, having to take a off route to get there didn't plan correctly, but I ended up getting a tomahawk, which is just outside of Drayton Valley with eight kilometers left in the tank to spare.
00:01:37.000 So I managed to get gas.
00:01:38.660 Well, you've got more guts than a sausage. Now, tell me, tell me, Arthur, you took some footage, which I gather has gone around the world. What was that about?
00:01:53.340 I have. I mean, I was pretty much one of the only journalists crazy enough to go into this zone.
00:02:00.940 So France TV actually is showing the Western Standard footage in France.
00:02:06.360 Last night I was on ABC Australia with with Rothschild.
00:02:12.180 So that was pretty neat.
00:02:13.600 You know, internationally, people are coming to the Western Standard for their for their news about the Alberta fires.
00:02:20.020 And yesterday, Nigel, I headed to Enwistle and I said it right because a townsperson taught me how to say it.
00:02:28.480 And I was basically I wanted to look for one of the most devastated areas in Alberta.
00:02:33.180 And I was told it was this town.
00:02:34.520 And of course, luck we have it.
00:02:36.960 Premier Smith was actually out on tour at the time.
00:02:40.200 She took time yesterday on the ground to visit these towns.
00:02:44.480 And I actually attended with the Premier, got to got to get in her SUV and go along.
00:02:52.260 During this time, you may you've may have seen the footage of the of the bird trees and whatnot.
00:02:58.240 That was taken from the other side of the road out of out of respect for Albertans.
00:03:03.420 You know, a lot of these people haven't been able to and of course, there's twenty nine thousand that have been evacuated.
00:03:09.460 Now, a lot of these people haven't returned to their homes yet to to assess the damage nodules.
00:03:14.520 So out of respect for homeowners, I didn't want to actually post any pictures of properties that were damaged.
00:03:23.680 But I can just say it's unbelievable to see how fire moves.
00:03:30.300 And Danielle Smith spoke with officials yesterday.
00:03:33.000 I mean, she had an update from from Parkland County, from the mayor.
00:03:36.200 One house was lost in Parkland County as of yesterday and some outbuildings.
00:03:42.480 You know, she learned how fire moved. 0.96
00:03:44.540 It's amazing, Nigel, to watch how after the fire is out, of course, how it moved.
00:03:50.660 You know, it would stop in certain places and then go in the other crossroads, cross rivers.
00:03:56.900 But officials told Smith yesterday that it's going to take upwards to a year to extinguish some of the hot spots because of the soil that we have here in Alberta.
00:04:07.240 Yes, there's biological material in the soil that will smolder underground and just pop up suddenly.