St. Marys’ Gillian Martinez returns home after helping displaced residents during Manitoba wildfires

St. Marys Canadian Red Cross volunteer Gillian Martinez while stationed at the Brandon Municipal Airport.

By Galen Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

As wildfires continue to force the evacuation of residents of northern, eastern and western Manitoba to southern cities like Brandon and Winnipeg, one St. Marys resident was on the ground in Brandon assisting evacuees as part of the Red Cross response.

At the end of June, St. Marys’ Gillian Martinez returned home after nearly a month’s stay in Brandon, where she was part of the frontline effort to keep track of and rehouse those displaced by the fires. Though she’s volunteered with the Canadian Red Cross locally for the past 15 years, the trip out west was Martinez’s first out-of-province mission with the charity.

“I left May 29 and returned home June 21,” Martinez said. “My main role was as what’s called an emergency response team responder/supervisor. I was sent to Brandon, Man., and we were responsible for what’s called a reception centre with the group of volunteers there. So basically, you receive people who are coming in either by coach or plane or those who have driven down by themselves. They register with you so you know where they are. They could be staying with family or friends or you could then pass them on to the next stage, which is giving them accommodation. That’s one of the other big jobs of that team; to find hotels in the town.”

Just prior to Martinez’s arrival in the province, a provincewide state of emergency was declared for Manitoba on May 28 – the first of two to be declared with the second declared July 10 after a number of communities issued more mandatory evacuation orders. As of June 24, one day after the first state of emergency was lifted, 131 fires had burned in Manitoba this year alone with 18 still active at the time.

As of that same date, roughly 911,096 hectares had burned in 2025 and the Canadian Red Cross reported roughly 22,000 evacuees had registered with the charity from roughly 8,000 households across more than two-dozen communities. While many were allowed to return home after the previous emergency declaration was lifted, as of last week, it was reported nearly 13,000 people were forced to once again evacuate.

With so many people on the move, Martinez’s role in the response was to help keep track of all those moving people so family and friends could find their loved ones after they were evacuated to the south of the province.

“It was almost 10,000 people at one point in northern Manitoba coming down between Winnipeg and Brandon,” Martinez said. “The main communities we had were places like Flin Flon and Cranberry Portage, and a few others were flown in and bussed in. So, we had quite a lot of people from different communities up north in Manitoba. So, you’re helping them to register and settle, and there’s another team called safety and wellbeing who would go around the hotel (where the reception centre was located) and just check in on people.

“They would help them with rooms or having to involve other services, and health people came and other welfare people from their towns came. It was a big team effort.”

Martinez said many of the people and families she registered were very anxious because they didn’t know if they would be able to return to their homes. She said those she helped would show her photographs and security camera feeds that showed the proximity of the fires back home and she did her best to put their minds at ease by explaining the registration and resettlement process, and providing hugs, teddy bears for children and any other comforts she could whenever possible.

“It was a very compassionate response,” Martinez said. “There are seven basic principles of the Red Cross, and two of them are very important in terms of humanitarian aid. You’re helping everyone equally because there’s a big number of First Nations and there’s non-First Nations as well. And there’s people who have more and people who have less – economic differences – so you’re treating everyone the same. It’s a humanitarian effort no matter who they are or where they come from.

“ … The local response was also tremendous because the health unit comes in, the local Indigenous health people come in, there was a peace officer who actually came from the Sioux Nation, which was very close. None of the Sioux Nation was evacuated because they’re south. He came – one gentleman and a few other people – and it was nice because they’re helping their people who speak the same language.”

One of the big considerations when assisting evacuees from Indigenous communities, Martinez explained, is the concept of family in those cultures. Families in those communities aren’t just four or five or six people; they can often comprise a whole community, making it even more important that volunteers like Martinez keep track of everyone in the hopes of reuniting them during their stay in Brandon or Winnipeg.

At the end of her stint in Brandon, Martinez was restationed to a hangar at the Brandon Municipal Airport where she and other volunteers helped load evacuees onto planes so they could return home after given the all-clear.

“On the last day I was there, I was at the airport in Brandon and they were sending over 250 people home,” Martinez said. “It was kind of interesting because we were in this really big, old hangar with all the little biplanes and hobby planes. It was a beautiful old hangar. Buses would come, you would give them the manifest and then they would go in a plane of six or a plane of eight or a plane of 50. So, that was very nice.

“And there was one little lady, and I said to her, ‘What will you do when you get home?’ ‘See my friends.’ They were probably in Winnipeg or other places,” Martinez said. “And then one little kid said, ‘Well, I’d like to ride my bicycle,’ because in the hotel situation, they’re not given that freedom they have when they’re at home.

“ … And then there was a baby carrier going home and this lady had this tiny little thing. She was five days old and she was going home. So, she was born while they were displaced. Nature doesn’t stop.”

As the Canadian Red Cross continues to help those displaced by fire in Manitoba, Martinez says she won’t hesitate to step in and volunteer with the organization when called upon again. Anyone else interested in volunteering with the Canadian Red Cross can visit redcross.ca/volunteer to learn more.