Many evacuees of the Bald Range wildfire fled Penticton, B.C., seen Aug. 8.Paige Taylor White/Reuters
Our house in Summerland was built around 1907, according to district archives, and had undergone a series of poorly executed renovations over the decades. The stone foundation had sunk and the floors tilted. Aluminum windows had been installed without headers. The attic was filled with asbestos laden insulation, and rodents infested the basement.
The renovation would be extensive, including abatement, lifting the house, excavation to make way for a basement and stripping it down to the studs while preserving and restoring any character that remained. It took 15 months, and like most residential construction, went over budget and over schedule. Once demolition begins, you’re at the mercy of your contractor’s estimate, and in our case, the budget was instantly blown by unexpected abatement and excavation costs. Anyone who’s built a house or done a major renovation knows the pain.
In recent years, the Okanagan has become a draw for people from the Lower Mainland, Alberta, Ontario, and other parts of the world. Some have made it their full-time home; others have made it a summer getaway. Summerland is part of the southern Okanagan, a large agricultural district near the lake of the same name, comprising five valleys filled with vineyards, orchards, farms and ranches. The semi-arid climate makes for hot summers with little rain throughout the year and steppe vistas of pines, grasses and silt bluffs. The wildfire threat always loomed, but in the 20 or so years I’d been visiting Summerland, a fire had never come close.
That optimism changed the day after we obtained our occupancy permit. Our boxes weren’t even unpacked when the fire broke out on a Friday night. From our house, we could see the wall of flame soaring skyward from behind a local mountain to the west. Within a few short hours, trees glowed red along the ridge and the fire started descending down the eastern side, towards us. Around 1 o’clock in the morning, we packed our bags and joined the steady traffic leaving town. We became part of a shockingly fast displacement, joining more than 20,000 people in Summerland and neighbouring Peachland to the north.
Inside the early battle against the ferocious Bald Range wildfire
Several people in our town of 12,000 residents braced themselves for the worst and stayed in their houses, despite the evacuation order. Against the wishes of government officials, several of those residents who stayed behind posted on social media, offering photos, videos, live streams and notifications as to what was intact and what was lost. Technology played a key role in those early hours of uncertainty and the following days, as residents hunted for clues. Security cameras and crowdsourced online content became the go-to sources for information. In an emergency situation, government policy is to only release information it deems absolutely necessary. Repeatedly, officials advised residents not to spread misinformation or seek answers anywhere outside of official channels.
Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Minister Kelly Greene told reporters last week that she didn’t want residents to find out they’d lost their homes through media sources. Instead of risking misinformation, officials said they’d contact homeowners directly after doing risk assessments on structures. But official information was scant, and many residents weren’t in the mood to wait. In the digital era, there is no controlling information, and most residents knew right away if their homes had made it through the night. Community-led sources were the first to provide information on the losses.
Down the hill from our house, Bernadine Jacobs, who took shelter in Kelowna, was prepared more than most. Five years ago, Ms. Jacobs had done a $1 million-plus renovation on her family house, where she operates a short-term rental. She’d installed a $26,000 generator in case of power failure, a metal roof and plumbed-in roof top sprinklers. When the power was lost, Ms. Jacobs could still see her house as well as the pitch-black surrounding neighbourhood. She offered relief to neighbours who connected with her throughout that stressful first night, because she could assure them that the fire hadn’t reached the lower town neighbourhood.
“I didn’t sleep. I stayed up all night looking at the cameras,” said Ms. Jacobs.
Nine days after evacuation, on a Sunday, Ms. Jacobs and her neighbours were allowed to return to their homes, the evacuation order downgraded to an alert. Her home, like our own, had survived. Our part of town looked surprisingly normal, the only oddity a scattering of black ash covering the ground. Others hadn’t been so fortunate, and as of Monday, it still wasn’t clear how many houses had been lost. According to sources, Faulder to the west had been mostly decimated, and Meadow Valley and Garnet Valley had been hit hard, and the fire had jumped the highway north of town and destroyed the landmark La Punta Norte guest house.
As the town residents began their staged re-entry phase, the quest for information continued. The Bald Range wildfire continued to burn to the west, and so did the town dump. Bernie Wright, who lives a kilometre from the landfill, said he wanted to know about the quality of the air, which will contain toxins.
“We are the closest residents to the landfill, and we are especially worried about our health being impacted by contaminated smoke, soot and ash,” said Mr. Wright.
B.C. crews fight wildfire near Summerland as more evacuees return home
On the fifth day of evacuation, B.C. Premier David Eby acknowledged that government needs to review its response to disasters such as the Bald Range fire, and promised an “after-action-review.”
“There’s an important set of lessons for us to take about how quickly this moved, and that this may be our new normal for fire speed,” he said at a Penticton press conference.
Simon Fraser University’s director of the City Program, Andy Yan, has worked on natural disaster recovery. He recently created a map of all the heat deaths that occurred during the heat dome of 2021 in B.C. As an urban planner, he worked on the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, assessing buildings and neighbourhoods for damage and recovery.
“At the core of the issue is trust.” he said. “The trust of the public to process information when many are facing one of the worst moments of their lives and the trust in government and institutions to produce and share accurate and prompt news about fast changing and unknown situations.
“If we look at examples in Japan, I think they have a stronger civic fabric as a network of civic organizations and government agencies and a public and culture that is prepared to know what to do and expect in a mass emergency. The thirst for timely and reliable information can be just as urgent as the need for clean drinking water.”
As of this writing, we’re back in our house but there are many questions that remain unanswered. The fire rages on, but in an arc further west and to the north. I know this from NASA’s satellite-based fire map, which tracks all the world’s fires – and which I had never heard of before this past week. And I know now how quickly disaster information evolves moment-by-moment, day-by-day from initial shock to the first phase of recovery, and how information is, really, simply the antidote to fear.