Fleeing Canada’s wildfires: They thought there was no immediate danger. Then a wall of smoke arrived | CNN

At first, all Miiyah Paavola could see was a thick wall of smoke. From her home in Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, northwestern Ontario, the smoke appeared close. But the remote Indigenous community says that on that Monday, July 13, they were told by the Ministry of Natural Resources there was no immediate danger. Within hours, they were fleeing for their lives. “It was all very fast-paced. There was not really much time to think about what was happening,” Paavola told CNN. She grabbed a wet towel before squeezing aboard a small aluminum boat with five other people, three dogs and a cat. The isolated community, also known as Collins First Nation, has no road access, only a railway line and Collins Lake. Paavola couldn’t fully grasp the scope of the danger until her boat pulled away. “All you could see was orange and gray and it was very dark,” she said. But as they sailed away, she could finally see just how close they’d been to the fires. “When I was going across maybe about the second island, that’s when I watched it. I could just barely see the flames reach the shoreline. And it was a very thick wall of smoke that followed it very quickly.” “If we had waited