For Howard Rensler, Tuesday, May 3 started like any other day, with him waking at 6 a.m. in the Fort McMurray condo he shares with his wife Diana and heading to work at the local Boys and Girls Club, where he is executive director.

But the day didn’t end until 8 a.m. the following morning, when he and Diana completed what he called a “harrowing” 12-hour drive to Edmonton along a flame-licked highway clogged with roughly 80,000 other people fleeing the wildfire that was consuming their city.

As they drove, with the fire raging about 50 kilometres away from the four-lane highway and the air full of ash that Rensler described as “chunks of trees four to five inches wide burning and floating across the highway,” he said they didn’t know if they would make it.

“We just had to keep going and suppress whatever anxiety we were feeling… to subdue our impatience and panic,” he said.

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Originally from Toronto, Rensler, 65, has lived in Fort McMurray for about five years, after moving from Kelowna, B.C., where he’d gone for work in 2004.

He said he’s only aware of about a dozen other Jews living in Fort McMurray and that while there’s no local synagogue, a handful of local Jews often get together for Passover seders.

By around noon on May 3, Rensler recalled, the handful of spot fires that had started in the forest close to Fort McMurray had begun to move toward the city.

Hearing the news on radio and social media, Rensler, who was at the Boys and Girls Club overseeing the care of dozens of children aged one to 17, said he contacted the kids’ parents and guardians and spent several hours waiting for all the children to be picked up.

By 2 p.m., officials issued what was called an “optional evacuation” and Rensler and his wife went to one of the interim stations set up in town – it was considered safe for the moment because it was surrounded by water – and helped register the roughly 300 people there, a number of whom needed medical assistance due to smoke inhalation, mental distress or because they had been evacuated from the hospital.

A few hours later, an official mandatory evacuation order was issued and a bus system was set up to transport people from the interim shelter to a more distant one about 50 to 100 km outside of town.

At that point, Rensler said, the smoke was bothering his wife quite a bit, so they decided to take their car on the highway and drive to Edmonton.

Although they intended to stop by their condo, which was nearby, to pick up a few things, when they go to their street the police and fire department were there and turned them away.

The distance between Fort McMurray and Edmonton is about 400 kilometres, but as they set out on the drive, Rensler said the bumper-to-bumper traffic caused by people fleeing meant that for parts of the journey they could only move at a pace of two km/h.

When they needed gas, the couple had to wait for two hours, in a lineup that was about five kilometres long, to get their ration of 40 litres at a station halfway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton.

For part of the drive, the fire was moving south, in the same direction they were, before it began moving east.

“At one point, the flames were right by the edge of the highway… I saw an entire four-storey hotel go from a rooftop fire to complete ash in the time it took for us to pass it, about 30 feet from the road… On the opposite side of the highway, a gas station blew up and took down a couple of businesses with it,” Rensler said.

Exhausted and with only the clothes on their backs, on the morning of May 4, they pulled into a motel that morning in suburban Edmonton occupied largely by other evacuees from the burning resource town.

He said the response from the hotel and the general Edmonton community was “overwhelming.” The motel put them up free of charge that first night and brought in food for the evacuees, while people came to the hotel bearing clothes and toiletries for those in need.

The Renslers stayed at the motel for a few more nights before flying to Kelowna, where they’re currently staying in the guest bedroom of friends.

A week after the fire that swept through Fort McMurray, destroying thousands of buildings and causing roughly 90,000 residents to evacuate, the Renslers don’t know the extent of the damage to their rented condo, or whether it’s even still standing.

They’ve received a small advance for their insurance company, but he noted they are “burning through that pretty fast.”

“We’re told it’ll be about three weeks before the evacuation issue is lifted and it’s safe to go back, so the plan is to go back then, and then I’ll do what I can to reinstate the Boys and Girls Club,” Rensler said.

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For the time being, Rensler said their focus is to ”do our best to survive here, and then we’ll go back.”

While Rensler said he hasn’t had direct contact with the Edmonton Jewish community, local Jewish organizations, as well as those in other parts of Canada, have been part of the efforts to raise money for the tens of thousands of evacuees.

The Jewish Federation of Edmonton, which set up a PayPal account to collect donations on May 4, has raised close to $6,000, which it says it will likely donate to the Canadian Red Cross.

The Jewish Community Outreach Reconnect Edmonton (J.CORE), an agency of the federation, has been collecting toys, food and diapers to deliver to evacuees staying in and around Edmonton, and is working to connect evacuees with local families offering to put them up in their homes.

The Calgary Jewish Federation sent an initial $25,000 to the Canadian Red Cross from an existing emergency relief fund and has since opened a fundraising campaign, for which it’s raised over $17,000.

It will, after learning where the greatest needs are, donate that money accordingly.

Elliott Steinberg, the federation’s marketing and communications manager, also said some families from Fort McMurray have, “literally taken shelter in [homes of people] in the Jewish community.”

The Toronto-based social service organization Ve’ahavta launched a Fort McMurray relief fund May 4, and has raised over $25,000 to date.

Of that, $10,000 will be donated to IsraAid, an Israeli non-profit that provides disaster relief and long-term support in crisis areas worldwide.