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Man affected by Fort Mac fire proud to call Chilliwack home

After losing his condo, belongings and job, Nathan Saretsky is picking up the pieces one year later
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A police officer stands in the middle of a Fort McMurray neighbourhood destroyed by the forest fire last May. (Submitted photo)

It was a fire that Canadians won’t soon forget.

It’s been a year since Fort McMurray was evacuated as a forest fire descending on the city. Homes, businesses, and livelihoods were destroyed. The people fleeing the fire needed help immediately, and would continue to need it to this day.

And very quickly, residents in Chilliwack banded together to provide some of that help.

Nathan Saretzky was raised in Chilliwack but was living in Fort McMurray’s Abasand neighbourhood when the fire broke out. He’d been there for about five years, and was an aircraft mechanic apprentice with McMurray Aviation.

Abasand was hit hard, and the condo he had been renting was destroyed. He considers himself lucky to have had a couch to sleep on in Edmonton while others were cared for in emergency shelters. Still, he says, he lost everything.

“I was fairly fortunate in where I was, I wasn’t in any immediate danger,” he says. “Initially I was evacuated to the downtown evacuation centre, and just being there seeing what was going on…”

But that centre was evacuated, too.

“It was surreal, it was absolutely surreal,” he says. “Seeing fire in the median, fire on my left and fire on my right, it was everywhere.”

It took a while for him to realize he would be so negatively affected by the fire. But slowly, symptoms of post traumatic stress started to rear up. In the weeks that followed, he even lost his job. He landed in Lloydminster next, but couldn’t keep the job there, either.

He went back to Fort Mac to collect his belongings, and was prepared for the worst.

“I did go back once simply to pick up what little I had left,” he says. “I had my toolbox to pick up. I wasn’t able to see the remains of the condo I was renting was. It was still dangerous, still closed off, that was about a month after the evacuation.”

While he called the trip surreal, with completely black sticks of burnt trees standing next to lush, untouched trees, he says “initially it wasn’t bad.”

“It wasn’t until some months after, everything just piled up and piled up,” he says. Anxiety, depression, and other PTSD symptoms crept in. He went on leave from his new job, and he headed back to Chilliwack to live with his parents.

Now, he’s found a new job, and he’s starting to recover from the grief of losing everything.

“I’ve actually been pretty good,” he says. He’s trying to focus on the positive things, and one of those beacons of hope is how his hometown came together to support those affected by the fire. While he didn’t benefit directly from the Chilliwack for Ft. Mac efforts, the knowledge that Chilliwack residents mobilized so quickly buoys his spirits to this day.

With a year passing since the fire, Saretzky feels it’s a good time to once again thank those who rushed to help.

“They got there very quickly. I wasn’t in one of the evacuation centres, I was on a couch in Edmonton,” he says. “But it was more of a point of personal pride. I’ve jumped around and moved around quite a lot, and never really had that hometown pride a lot of people have. But knowing that this was where I went to high school, this is where my parents live … it was very heartwarming.

“This is where I was from, and … they did that because they felt it was the right thing to do. It was quite a feat and I couldn’t be more proud.”

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Chilliwack for Fort Mac was a huge movement of support that saw truckloads of donated food, clothing and water shipped by local truckers to evacuation centres in the days of the fire that ripped through the northern Alberta city. It’s been almost one year since the fire started, and many people are still working to get back on their feet. (Progress file)


Jessica Peters

About the Author: Jessica Peters

I began my career in 1999, covering communities across the Fraser Valley ever since.
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