Ottawa, Canada (AFP)-The western Canadian province of Saskatchewan declared a wildfire emergency on Thursday, becoming the second to do so after neighbouring Manitoba had ordered 17,000 people to quickly flee their homes in remote communities a day earlier.

“It’s a very serious situation that we’re faced with in Saskatchewan,” the province’s Premier Scott Moe told a news conference.

“We are putting in place every measure possible to prepare our communities,” he continued.

Around 4,000 residents were evacuated from the province earlier this week, and more evacuations appear possible with no rain in the weather forecast.

“Looking ahead, it doesn’t look good. It looks like it is going to further deteriorate,” Moe added.

Manitoba declared a province-wide state of emergency late Wednesday and ordered the evacuations of several small towns and Indigenous communities as the province experienced its worst start to a wildfire season in years.

Many of the weary evacuees arrived in the provincial capital Winnipeg on Thursday after a long and harrowing nighttime drive on jammed roads.

In two remote northern Indigenous communities in Manitoba, “Air Force planes were deployed and…in the process of evacuating people,” Canada’s Emergency Management Minister Eleanor Olszewski said Thursday.

At a city hockey arena set up as an emergency shelter, Matthew LaRosa, who fled the town of Flin Flon in northern Manitoba with his mother Lisa, told the Free Press it had simply been a “long day.”

“Yesterday, when we got the evac notice, it was, ‘Go to the house, grab everything, load the truck and get out of town,'” he told the daily.

Winnipeg Mayor Scott Gillingham said in a news release, “We know many families are arriving with little more than the clothes on their backs.”

“As thousands flee dangerous wildfires, Winnipeg will do what we’ve always done in times of crisis: open our doors and stand together,” he said.

– ‘Long way from home’ –

“People are exhausted,” Luc Mullinder, head of the Manitoba branch of the Red Cross, told AFP.

“They’ve traveled a long way from home and folks don’t know if their home is going to be there when they get back or whether they can get back,” he said.

“So there’s a range of strong emotions.”

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has said the province was experiencing its worst start to a wildfire season in years.

“This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” he told a news conference late Wednesday.

The widespread nature of the fires was also cause for alarm, he warned.

“For the first time, it’s not a fire in one region, we have fires in every region. That is a sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to.”

Nearly 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of forests have been scorched in just the past month in Manitoba, three times the annual average for the past five years, according to officials.

Across Canada, there are currently 163 active fires, with half of them considered out of control.

Flin Flon, a mining town about 800 kilometers (497 miles) north of Winnipeg with about 5,000 residents, is the largest single community to be evacuted so far this year.

Its mayor, George Fontaine, said midday Thursday that the last bus out of town was about to leave as wildfires burned to just 500 meters (0.3 miles) from the town.

“It’s a very tense situation,” he told AFP.

Firefighters were trying to push back the flames, he said, but “visibility is very poor due to the smoke, so it’s impossible for water bombers to get near the fires to attack them.”

“It’s all weather-dependent at this point,” he said.