For Brooke Kindel and her family, escaping the wildfire was only the beginning

Image: Brooke Kindel and her family (via Brooke Kindel)

On the afternoon of May 28, 2025, Brooke Kindel was outside with her family at their home in Denare Beach, Saskatchewan.

Wildfires had been burning nearby. Brooke’s four-year-old could see the smoke and flames around nearby Flin Flon and was scared. But back home in Denare Beach, no one was talking about evacuating.

Then Brooke happened to check Snapchat.

A friend had posted a video capturing a r

adio announcement that Denare Beach was under a mandatory evacuation notice, with residents being given two hours to leave.

“I just looked at my phone and saw a Snapchat video,” Brooke remembers. “I was like, oh my god, what?”

Brooke was 34 weeks pregnant and had two young children to get ready. She had to decide what to bring without knowing how long they would be gone. Even then, she still didn’t believe her home was at risk of burning down.

Her husband and father stayed behind to help protect the community. Both had firefighting experience, as did Brooke, who had been a firefighter before having children.

But Brooke says Denare Beach had only 11 local firefighters trying to protect the community – including her husband and father. 

They were primarily trained for structural fires, Brooke says, they simply did not have the people or equipment needed to fight a wildfire as big as the one that was headed for their town.

“Our local people did everything that they could,” she says.

Image: Smoke from a wildfire in nearby Flin Flon a day before Brooke evacuated (via Brooke Kindel)

Brooke believes the response was mismanaged, with firefighting resources focused on other nearby communities even as people in Denare Beach warned that the danger to their community was growing.

Days after the evacuation, Brooke’s father called her and said, “I think we’re going to lose the town tomorrow. We have no help. We’re trying our best.”

He stayed to help fight the fire until it was no longer safe. When he finally left, he drove for hours through areas where flames burned on both sides of the road. 

Just before losing cell service, the fire chief called to tell him Brooke’s house was on fire, with flames so high he couldn’t see the house behind it.

Her father arrived at the family’s temporary home late that night, “filthy, exhausted, and smelling of smoke,” said Brooke.

The first thing he said was, “I’m so sorry. We did everything we could.”

By then, Brooke’s home and her father’s were both gone.

Image: What remained of Brooke’s home after the fire (via Brooke Kindel)

More than a year later, her family is still trying to pick up the pieces.

They are still fighting with their insurance company and have not been able to rebuild their house. After moving between temporary homes, they built an outbuilding on their property. Today, they live in a camper parked inside it, on the same land where their home once stood.

Looking back, Brooke wishes she had understood her insurance coverage better. Her family learned that replacing what they lost would cost far more than they expected. 

For example, their outbuildings were insured for $75,000. Brooke says they were quoted $690,000 to rebuild them.

“I bet even if you looked at your own home policy, you would be grossly underinsured and you wouldn’t realize it because of the prices that have changed,” she says.

For Brooke, what happened in Denare Beach points to a bigger need to prepare communities for a changing climate.

“Climate change is affecting our local environments whether we believe in it or not,” she says. “When we turn on the news we are constantly being bombarded with climate disasters around the world and it’s only a matter of time before it’s in your own backyard.”

She wants governments to help communities prepare for those risks and make sure they have the people and equipment needed when disaster comes.

“Governments need to make resiliency strategies and help people plan for the inevitable disaster to come, whether that’s fire smarting, hurricane proofing, flood proofing or anything else that nature throws at us.”

For Denare Beach specifically, Brooke believes more resources and a better coordinated response could have changed what happened.

“If there was enough people and the right equipment, I believe we could have probably saved our town.”

But there are also things Brooke wishes she had known herself, including what to take if her family ever had to leave home in an emergency.

Brooke encourages people to think about that before they are facing an evacuation, even if wildfire isn’t the risk where they live.

“Other people, their house might flood, their house might get hit by a tornado or hurricane,” she says. “As climate change is happening, there’s so many different ways that you can just be devastated by nature.”

For Brooke, preparing means thinking about the things that aren’t easily replaced. She thinks about her wedding dress, personal photos and artwork, and Christmas ornaments filled with memories – all things she wishes she had been able to save.

Her advice is to think about those things before an emergency happens and, where possible, keep the most important items together in a bin that can be easily taken with you.

“It’s not just your stuff. It’s your kids’ stuff, it’s your grandparents’ things after they pass away,” she says. “The whole generation of everything that you’ve ever had to tell your family story.”

After losing so much of her own family history, Brooke hopes her story can help other families be better prepared, and push governments to make sure communities have the people, equipment, and plans in place to protect them when disaster comes.