A wildfire near the Saskatchewan-Alberta border yesterday forced several communities in the southwest to be evacuated.

The Town of Burstall was the first to be cleared with the community sending out a notice to its' residents at 2:30 p.m. and within an hour and a half the settlement was empty except for a team of emergency responders.

Burstall's deputy mayor David Pidlisny said as town officials were preparing to put in an alert to evacuate an important call came in.

"We had a call from the Burstall School," he recalled. "We asked the school to send all the children home and call the buses into pick up the farm children. Then we put on the alert to evacuate the community, and we started that process."

Pidlisny said it was a gradual escalation allowing the town to be able to take it in steps.

"All we saw was smoke," he told Swift Current Online. "There was zero visibility in the Town of Burstall, but we never saw any flames, because it was on the south side of town and we were here at the town office."

Although it is still early Pidlisny doesn't believe there was any damage to Burstall caused by the fire.

As the strong winds continued to intensify the blaze, it caused the hamlet of Liebenthal also to be evacuated with all evacuees being sent to the Town of Leader.

By 6 p.m. the town of 863 people was also being asked to evacuate and head to the Elk's Hall in Kindersley. Twenty-seven health patients from the Leader Hospital were relocated to Swift Current during the evacuation.

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