Canada’s defence minister said on Saturday that people were killed and injured in an incident at a military base in Alberta that caused a major fire, while reports said that large numbers of injured people were transported to hospitals.
Fire crews scrambled late into the night as fierce winds whipped flames beyond Canadian Forces Base Wainwright and into the surrounding rural area.
It was not immediately clear how many people were killed or injured, but a doctor at a hospital in the city of Edmonton, 180 kilometres (120 miles) northwest, told Canada’s national broadcaster that patients were being brought to hospitals across the city as healthcare facilities around the base became “completely overwhelmed” by the number of people needing care. “This number of patients would overwhelm the city of Edmonton,” Dr Warren Thirsk, an emergency department physician at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, told CBC News. “It is more patients than any of us want to count right now. It’s a disaster. It’s a one in every 15- to 25-year disaster.”
Acute Care Alberta said several hospitals across the province had activated a “Code Orange,” an emergency designation used when multiple severely injured patients require coordinated medical care.
The agency said emergency medical resources were stretched so thin that extremely few ambulances were available in the Edmonton area.
It urged people to avoid the University of Alberta Hospital emergency department if possible.
Wainwright Mayor Bruce Pugh said the town’s small hospital was not designed to handle a mass-casualty incident but praised the response of local medical personnel. He said helicopters and planes had been transporting patients to other facilities for treatment.