Courtesy of the Town of Rainbow Lake:
May 17 2023 – We are beginning to experience the groundhog day effect. The fire is still aggressive, but the pressure on the Town has stayed relatively low for the last couple days. Understanding the risk is still very real, and we are maintaining patrols, our confidence is increasing with every quiet period. We are still without power and will not be able to provide a estimate on when that may be restored until Atco can safely assess their recovery operations.
While we are experiencing this period of calm, the fire is still active on our containment lines and it is not safe to come back yet. We are also seeing active burning in the vicinity of the Cenovus plant and Highway 58. We have had a number of individuals trying to come back into Town due to concerns of losing the contents of their refrigerators and deep freezers. At this point we are not able to let anyone through that is not part of the emergency. Given we do have some calm, we believe that we have some capacity, in between fire patrols, to clear out peoples refrigerators and deep freezers for them so that is one less worry for your families at this time. If you can email me at dfletcher@rainbowlake.ca, we will coordinate efforts to try to clear as many homes as possible to help out.
We cannot guarantee that we will be able to get to everyone, and we will only proceed if you send along a request via email with permission to do so.
We are winning this battle against the Long Lake fire and ask that everyone stay safe and we will continue to keep you updated as the situation evolves.
I would also like to open it up to our residents that have specific questions they would like addressed in the updates to email me at dfletcher@rainbowlake.ca and so long as we stay quiet here, I will try to address them as best I can for everyone with the following update.
We do ask that everyone call in and register with our reception team at 1-780-560-0164 if you have not already.
Please stay safe and we will continue to push out daily updates here and on our Town of Rainbow Lake Facebook page.
