The next two days will be crucial for Chibougamau, according to Mayor Manon Cyr. The authorities are monitoring the direction of the winds, which have so far been favorable to the work of the firefighters, and above all implore the sky to send them rain quickly.
Thursday morning, the sun shone above Chibougamau in an almost cloudless sky. While the eastern United States is suffocating, there is no trace of the huge fires burning in Jamésie in the town that is a few kilometers from the blazes.
The portrait is however misleading, indicates the mayoress Manon Cyr. The situation is going well for the moment, but Mother Nature still controls the game: no return home is possible before Saturday.
“It has to rain,” insists the mayor. The problem is that there aren’t more announced. »
Environment Canada predicts that the next precipitation in Jamésie will fall no earlier than Tuesday. Until then, SOPFEU is creating trenches around the city’s crucial infrastructure, erecting defenses in the hope that they will slow the advance of the flames if the situation were to suddenly worsen.
Despite the dry weather expected over the next few days, the mayor, who was in Roberval on Thursday morning to meet the evacuees and, above all, satisfy the media beast that has been soliciting her from all sides for two days, had some encouraging news. to share.
“We have enough teams in terms of emergency measures. We have night teams and daytime measures, ”she said from the emergency reception center erected in the Roberval arena.
On Wednesday, SOPFEU’s interventions bore fruit, she said, making it possible to strengthen the ramparts that must protect Chibougamau from blazes. However, the tide can turn, warns Manon Cyr, and the threat, suddenly reappear at the gates of the city.
” What we let’s check, today and Friday is really the direction of fires. What we are hoping for above all is rain, ”says the mayor. The return home of the evacuees, in the best of the cases, will not take place before Saturday. Everything will depend on the next two days, insists the elected official of Chibougamau.
The mayor spoke with her counterpart from Sept-Îles on Thursday morning. Himself emerges from an episode where the raging forest fires have, for a moment, threatened to swallow neighborhoods.
“Steve [Beaupré] said to me: “You’ll see, Manon, you’ll fight a fire and you’ll think it’s settled, but by the time you turn around, you’ll perhaps notice that there are another advancing on the other side.” »