First a fight, then friendship for four Fort McMurray evacuees

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Ted Dreger is 69, retired, wears a black bowler hat and his wiry white hair long.

He admits to being ornery. He picked fights with two strangers at the evacuation centre for Fort McMurray residents in Anzac earlier this week. Now he and those two evacuees – one originally from Jamaica, the other from Gambia – are are all helping each other out. The other two men can even tell the story of how Mr. Dreger met his wife.

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Mr. Dreger met fellow evacuee Badou N'Dure first. The 37-year-old had his phone plugged in and was playing on it. Mr. Dreger, whose wife, Lydia, was in a different evacuation centre north of Fort McMurray, wanted to charge his phone.

"I told him: 'Don't be so inconsiderate, hording the plug-in,'" Mr. Dreger recounted on Friday afternoon at the Lac La Biche evacuation centre, where the new friends are now stuck. "Maybe my approach was wrong, but when you're going through it, my temperament was wrong."

Then Errol Shaw came into the picture. It took him about six hours to get from Fort McMurray to Anzac, which is usually about a 40-minute drive south of the city, when he evacuated on Tuesday evening. He jumped in the back of a truck, then two evacuation buses. Each bus waited two to three hours before taking off because officials wanted the seats filled. He arrived in Anzac early Wednesday morning.

Mr. Dreger was trying to rest on a cot in the chaotic Anzac facility, where lines for food and paperwork ran about 55 minutes each, when Mr. Shaw started talking on his phone on a nearby stretcher. Mr. Dreger told him to shush it. Mr. Shaw, who is from Jamaica and has a family in Toronto, was not in the mood.

"I said to myself: 'Who the hell is this guy?' But then I said: 'You know what? He's probably right.'"

The three have since talked it out and now are in this together. They are saving each other from the mental anguish that accompanies being among the 90,000 folks in and around Fort McMurray who have had to evacuate because of a wildfire burning out of control. The fire had wiped out about 100,000 hectares of land by late Friday morning. About 1,600 structures had burned as of Wednesday. Twelve structures had burned down in Anzac, the town south of Fort McMurray where the three enemies-turned-friends met, by Friday morning, according to the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo.

So far, the home where Mr. Shaw rents a suite is still standing. The Dregers believe their home is okay. Mr. N'Dure's place is gone. The Dregers have offered to take him in.

"It was like something was meant to be. Not often people click so easily," said Mr. Shaw, a supervisor at the Albian Sands Energy Inc. oil sands project.

Mr. Dreger, who is from Abbotsford, B.C., but has lived in Fort McMurray for 15 years, needs assistance because he wears a prosthetic leg below his right knee. On the left, a brace supports his weak ankle. Ms. Dreger, who is 58 and originally from the Philippines, was freaking out at an evacuation camp north of Fort McMurray because she thought her husband would need someone to help him. On the phone, Mr. Dreger told her Mr. Shaw – he kept calling the 63-year-old "Herold" rather than "Errol" – was taking care of him.

Ms. Dreger, who was at the evacuation camp at Suncor Energy Inc.'s Fort Hills oil sands project, eventually realized that "Herold" was the Errol Shaw she knew when they worked together at Suncor, and she set her husband straight on his name.

"Errol's been the one helping me through all this," Mr. Dreger said, sitting beside Mr. Shaw in the makeshift dining room in the Bold Center in Lac La Biche. "Because I did need his help."

When Anzac's evacuation centre was evacuated on Wednesday evening, Mr. Shaw had a chance to get on a bus to Edmonton. He took a pass and piled into Mr. Dreger's truck with Mr. D'Nure. The trio was given 30 litres of gas – enough to get to the evacuation centre in Lac La Biche. They arrived around 1:30 a.m. on Thursday.

"It was like starting all over again," Mr. Shaw said, although the group is impressed with the amenities, food, hospitality, and organization at the Bold Center.

Ms. Dreger, who moved to Fort McMurray about 10 years ago, was still north of Fort McMurray. Around 11 p.m. on Thursday, she was airlifted to Edmonton, landing at around 11:45 p.m. The three men, still short on sleep, took off in the truck to get her.

The trio arrived at the airport at around 2 a.m. on Friday, collected Ms. Dreger, and turned around, eschewing the larger Edmonton evacuation centre where they would have access to better services. Mr. Shaw wants to be as close to Fort McMurray as possible in case he can return to work. They were back at the Bold Center by 5:15 a.m.

And they will move as a pack again soon. Mr. Shaw and his family in Toronto have a Norwegian cruise booked for next week. He needs a ride to the airport, and the foursome will go together.

"Hanging out with them helps," Mr. N'Dure, who works at the Long Lake oil sands project, said of his three new friends at a round table in the lunchroom. "We've been doing almost everything together. I like it."

And as for the Dreger's love story, Mr. Shaw starts the tale. Ms. Dreger was walking by Mr. Dreger's place one day, Mr. Shaw said. Then Mr. Dreger finished his new pal's sentence. Mr. Dreger suggested the woman say "Howdy" to him next time she walked by, and he asked her on date. She said she was married.

"I said: 'We have lawyers to take care of it,'" Mr. Dreger told her.

They have been together 11 years.