Canadian government steps in as ‘out of control’ wildfires force thousands to flee
British Columbia battling 102 fires day and night across province, as breakneck speed hampers firefighters’ efforts
Canada’s federal government has announced it will provide urgent assistance to British Columbia after an onslaught of unprecedented fast-moving wildfires that killed one person and forced about 22,000 people to flee their homes in frantic evacuations.
A total of 102 wildfires were raging across the province on Sunday, of which nearly half were categorised as “out of control”, according to the BC Wildfire Service. Of those fires, 78 ignited during the past week.
The entire community of Summerland, about 30 miles (48km) south-west of the city of Kelowna and home to about 12,000 people, was evacuated overnight on Saturday, along with a further 8,000 people around nearby Peachland. About 10,000 others have been told to prepare to evacuate at a moment’s notice.
Anette Boulet was among residents who fled Summerland along Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. As she and her family left around 4.30am Saturday, their home was shrouded in smoke.
“You couldn’t see barely. It was just dark, and the ridge, the ridge of fire just coming towards you,” said Boulet, who evacuated to a centre in Penticton.
“There’s no words to express it, the fear.”
In a social media post on Sunday, Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management and community resilience, said she had “approved a request for federal assistance from British Columbia to provide shelter and accommodations for people who have been forced to leave their homes”.
“I have tasked federal officials, led by the government operations centre at Public Safety Canada, to work with the province to ensure support reaches those who need it most,” she said.
Efforts to battle the Bald Range wildfire have been hampered by the breakneck speed of its spread.
The blaze was first detected late on Friday evening, and grew within hours to more than 40 sq miles (100 sq km) – nearly twice the size of the island of Manhattan – as it raced nearly nine miles toward Okanagan Lake.
The province’s premier, David Eby, declared a state of emergency late on Saturday, telling reporters that the blaze had been “like a bomb going off.”
Cliff Chapman, BC Wildfire Service’s director of provincial operations, said the prolonged hot and dry weather the province has faced this summer had resulted in “explosive” fire conditions never seen before. Lightning caused by thunderstorms forecast this week could make the situation still worse, he said.
Residents were shaken awake in the middle of the night to flee their homes. Jennifer Pascoa, who lives in Summerland, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that she had begun to pack when she saw flames licking the nearby mountains.
“It happened so quickly. We came home from the beach, we saw the plume of smoke, and then within an hour, the sky was covered in dark, black clouds,” she said.
The British Columbia Wildfire Service said 10 standard helicopters and one night-vision helicopter were involved in the response.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s federal police force, said an 80-year-old woman died while trying to escape the wildfire that forced evacuations in the Okanagan Lake region.
Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, said the rapidity of the fires’ spread was indicative of increasingly extreme blazes springing up in Canada and the US.
Southern BC and the pacific north-west in the US had had little to no rain in the past six weeks, leaving the regions “bone dry”, he said. “You walk through the forest, it crunches; if you look sideways, you start a fire.”
These conditions were being driven by human-caused climate change, he said. “We’re seeing higher intensity fires today than the past … the shorter the timeframe, the more challenging it is.”
Before this decade, fire agencies’ policy was that if a blaze was 20km (12 miles) away from a community, there was no cause for immediate concern. The ferocity and speed of these fires meant that such calculations no longer held, said Flannigan, warning that all homes in at-risk regions should have an emergency kit ready to go.
“If a fire can run 60km in a day, you should be worried about it,” he said.
The Bald Range fire was also an example of how fires could metastasise through the night, he said.
Traditional firefighting practices would usually give firefighters a break during nightfall, as the cooler air would slow the burning. “That’s not the case any more. The fire roars through the evening, through the night, and we’re seeing this more and more,” he said.
Drought and the sheer power and size of the fires during the day allow them to keep momentum even in the dark. Fire management agencies in BC and Alberta now fight fires after dark using night-vision helicopters.
Current conditions indicated that the fire season in BC and the US states of Washington and Oregon could extend into the autumn, Flannigan said.
“It looks grim … there’s no rain,” he said, adding that, like California, Canada may begin to have “fire years” instead of a summer fire season.
“I’m scared for the coming weeks.”
In the US, crews in Washington that for over a week have been fighting three wildfires that began burning in the Spokane area continued clean-up near containment lines. None of the fires were growing, officials said. The fires have damaged or destroyed about 920 structures.
Earlier in the week a man was arrested and charged with intentionally setting the biggest of the three Spokane-area blazes.