More on the Yellowknife evacuations:

This is Canada’s worst-ever wildfire season with more than 1,000 active fires burning across the country, including 265 in the Northwest Territories. Experts say climate change has exacerbated the wildfire problem.

Drought has been a contributing factor to the number and intensity of this year’s fires, officials say, with high temperatures exacerbating the situation. Much of Canada has seen abnormally dry conditions.

Shane Thompson, the territorial environment minister, said the evacuation order had been issued late Wednesday to give people time to get out before the weather turned bad.

“The urgency is, fire changes drastically … the conditions are in our favor right now, but that will change on Saturday,” he told the CBC.

In total, about 65% of the Territories population of 46,000 people would be evacuated, he said.

There’s only one two-lane road out of Yellowknife to Alberta.

So far about 134,000 square km (52,000 square miles) of land in Canada have been scorched, more than six times a 10-year average. Nearly 200,000 people have been forced to evacuate at some point this season.

“The territories have never seen anything like this before in terms of wildfire … it’s an unimaginable situation for so many,” Mike Westwick, the territories’ fire information officer, told the CBC.

See…we were thinking this would happen to future people, who don’t matter, because they don’t exist [yet].