Front Burner - Homes destroyed, people displaced as wildfires scorch B.C., N.W.T.

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Unpredictable and unrelenting wildfires have destroyed blocks of homes, stores and buildings in West Kelowna and part of the Shuswap region in British Columbia. The province is currently under a state of emergency. 30,000 people are on evacuation order across B.C. and 36,000 more are under evacuation alert. This is happening against the backdrop of the country’s worst wildfire season on record, with ongoing evacuation efforts in the Northwest Territories, as fire approaches Yellowknife. Today, we head to Fort Providence in the Northwest Territories and Kelowna, B.C., to hear about the human cost of these unprecedented wildfires. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I think my house is gone. Is it close to the tree line? Yeah.

What do you think you're going to do next? I honestly have no idea. I haven't really thought that far. Just kind of see if my house survived, and if not, go from there. Zach Finemore grew up in West Kelowna. He's one of thousands of people in the city who've been worried since Thursday about wildfires burning down their homes. They've been really unpredictable and they've already destroyed buildings and structures and West Kelowna and parts of the Shuswap. The hills surrounding Lake Okanagan will be lit up again tonight. People anxious to know if their homes are still standing.

Flames blown by strong winds spitting out embers kilometers away. Just to see the aggression and how the wind and the different colors of the flames and how they candled was just, I was just absolutely devastated and almost fell to my knees. As of Sunday afternoon, the province was under a state of emergency with 30,000 people on evacuation order across BC and 36,000 more under evacuation alert. This is happening against the backdrop of, as we've said many times on the show, the country's worst wildfire season on record. Over 2,000 active fires right now, two-thirds of which are classified as out of control, and ongoing evacuation efforts in the Northwest Territories as the fires there get closer to the province's capital.

Very stressed. I've never been on a road trip with my son before. Yeah, it's scary. The threat is real. I saw it for myself. And as you can see, the smoke is right there. And the earlier we leave, it's much better for everybody else. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Today on the show, the human cost of these unprecedented wildfires from the last few days. We'll head to Fort Providence and the Northwest Territories in a bit. But first, I'm going to talk to our colleague Chris Walker. He's the host of Daybreak South, CBC Radio's morning show in Kelowna. Hi, Chris. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Tamara.

So, Chris, this is your community, and how are you doing? How worried are you about your own home and your loved ones? Well, I'm less worried than I was 24 hours ago. I can tell you that. We've had some cool weather here in Kelowna. The winds have dropped. But I'm still on evacuation alert. And members of my family are also on evacuation order and are waiting to find out if their home has burned down, which we think probably it has. So it's, you know, it's feeling a little better than it did 24 hours ago, but it's still a tense situation here. There's no question. Yeah. I'm glad some of that anxiety is gone at least, but I'm sorry to hear about the evacuation order. I hope that doesn't turn out to be true. I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about what it's like in Kelowna right now. Like, what does it smell like there?

It's like hell's campfire here. The smoke is so thick that you can't see buildings a kilometer away. It certainly can't see across the lake to West Kelowna where the bulk of that fire was and is. It's very, very thick, acrid smoke right now. Orange sun in the sky, which you can almost look at because of the thickness of the smoke. It's pretty spooky. The streets are quiet this morning, quieter than they were yesterday and the day before, because now all of the evacuees, or I assume almost everyone, has found a place to go. And emergency officials have asked people to just kind of stay home and just stay off the streets and stay out of the major routes just so that they can move around, that they can get done what they need to get done.

And there is a sense here now that hopefully, you know, cautious optimism that the worst has passed. But the worst was pretty bad. It's been a harrowing 24 hours for thousands of people forced to escape the unpredictable flames. Flames from the McDougal Creek fire jumped the lake from West Kelowna into Kelowna overnight. The out-of-control fire started Tuesday and has grown to more than 11 square kilometers in size. So officials are saying that a significant number of houses have been destroyed in the West Kelowna area. And we just heard a clip of a local teen who was worried about his

childhood home being burnt down by the McDougal Creek wildfire. And it's really heartbreaking to watch. How would you describe the feeling on the ground right now? Well, there's just a lot of anxiety about what's not known. You know, this is a large group of residential neighborhoods. No one can get in aside from firefighters. And so there are, I assume, thousands of people waiting to hear news about their home. You know, some people get news from doorbell cams that are still standing, some from pictures taken from boats. The occasional picture taken by a firefighter kind of trickles onto social media. But right now, everybody who lives over there is just waiting to find out whether they're in the same position as, you know, people who have now learned that their homes have gone, their childhood homes or their new homes or their rental homes. Just so many different situations.

And, you know, some people have places to stay and some people will have really good insurance. Other people would have no place to stay and will have no insurance. So this uncertainty, which will probably go now for another 48, 72 hours, is really hard on people. I have members of my own family. My ex-wife, my son's mother, her house is in a neighborhood that I watched burn on Friday night. And I watched eight homes across the lake on fire. I couldn't tell, you know, if it was hers or not. She can't tell if it's hers. The smoke is too thick to get pictures. We just have no idea. So my 11-year-old son is just waiting to find out if one of his two homes has been burned to the ground. And that's on top of the anxiety of watching all of this for the last couple of days. And it was, as it unfolded on Thursday and Friday, it was really dramatic to see. So there's a lot of anxiety.

There's going to be a lot of trauma and a lot of sort of picking up pieces for everybody in this community. And it's touched everybody. We're all connected. And so, you know, everybody here knows somebody, family or friends that's been affected. This event is going to leave a long, lasting scar on our community. People were jumping in the water, just like Hawaii. So, yeah, it's been a nightmare. We ended up being one of the last to leave because we were warning people.

I was running door to door. It was scary. It was like running for your life. door to door. It was scary. It was like running for your life. So West Kelowna's fire chief said that the situation on Thursday night was like 100 years of firefighting in one night. It was a devastating night last night, probably one of the toughest of my career, the toughest of all of our firefighters' careers. What do we know about how things got so bad so fast? Well, we came on our program on Thursday morning talking to Jason Brolin, that fire chief.

And this fire at the time was 68 hectares, which is tiny in the scheme of wildfires. But he was worried because the wind, you know, he knew was picking up. And how it got so bad is, you know, we've had two weeks of temperatures in the mid to high 30s. No rain for six, eight weeks. Very, very, very dry conditions. And we've had 100 years of logging and then poor forest management after the logging. And that has created forests that are very full of what foresters call fuel, that is underbrush. And because natural fire cycles haven't been working through these forests since the industrialization of the forests.

And then we have climate change. of the forests. And then we have climate change. So you can call it a natural disaster, but there are human decisions that have exacerbated this, not to mention the decision to build homes in what they call an interface area, which is essentially in the woods. And many, many, many homes in Kelowna have been built in the woods for, you know, since Kelowna's been around and continue to be. And so, you know, what made this so bad was a confluence of both natural and human factors exacerbated by wind blowing in the wrong direction. And it didn't take much for that 68-hectare fire on Thursday morning to come just roaring over the hill. And I watched it and I've never seen

anything like it. And what did you see on Thursday night? What did that look like? I don't know how to describe it to you. It was just incredible. My ex called me to come and pick up my son as they were trying to get back into their home. In fact, as the fire was coming down over that ridge, trying to get a few more things out, they were stopped at a checkpoint. It was clear they couldn't go any further. And so they waited at a little shopping center. So I popped over there, over the bridge to pick up my son. And as we watched from that bluff, there was flame as far as you could see north up the lake. And then when my son and I came back across the bridge, as I looked to my left, I saw flames shooting 100, 150 feet in the air in multiple places, houses literally exploding, trees exploding. I mean, I'm such a Kelowna

cliche. I drive a little convertible so you could hear the roar of the fire with the top down. And it's hard to believe that I saw that with my eyes. And I know firefighters are used to that kind of fire behavior. They call it rank five or rank six fire behavior. But to see that in an urban area, it was shocking. To see that in an urban area, it was shocking. So the fire is being fought on both shores of Lake Okanagan still. What are the biggest concerns there right now? Well, I think the biggest concern would be a change for the worse in the weather. At the moment, the weather is cooperating. At the moment, the weather's cooperating, and that's great because that's giving firefighters and their backup crews a chance to do things like build fire guards and to do some sort of house-to-house protection just in case those fires expand. But I think what everybody's worried about is another flare-up. You know, the embers from these fires can travel many kilometers. They jumped Okanagan Lake, which is a distance of about two kilometers at the point where the fire spread.

And so even without wind, these embers can float. And if they land on someone's roof and there are dry pine needles on that roof, you know, this could start all over again. There could be conflagrations here and there. So it's still a very dangerous situation. We're about 2000 meters from the front of, from the edge of the fire where I live. We're still on evacuation alert. We haven't unpacked our bags. They're still in our car. We're home, but we're ready to go at any moment. And I think that's the real concern. Now the forecast looks good for the next few days, but this is still a very, you know, and the firefighters you'll hear from will say, this is still a very active situation and it's not over. And so we just kind of hope and pray for cool temperatures and no wind.

So Kelowna is no stranger to fires. It's actually the site of another historic disaster that happened 20 years ago, the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park fires, which have been on people's minds given the severity of what we're seeing right now. And can you put what happened into context for us and how did that change and shape the region's relationship to fires? Well, this fire started 20 years to the day. In Kelowna's Kettle Valley neighborhood, flames roared to the edge of this development and residents were forced to evacuate. You know what? And I held out to the last minute because I was really hoping I wouldn't have to move up. And I'm just a little emotional right now. As the fire ravaged through fire guards above the homes, residents tried to pack up whatever they could,

loading boxes, furniture, anything they could carry into waiting trucks and cars. The morning that this start fire got underway, I spoke to the fire chief in Kelowna who was running this operation 20 years ago. And we had this conversation about how does this fit into what we and how we understand fire in the Kelowna area. And, yeah, I think it changed it in two ways, lessons that were learned and lessons that were not learned. So lessons that were learned, really comprehensive understanding of how to move people around, how to talk between agencies, how to make sure that different fire departments are talking to each other. That all now works very well across BC in large part because of the lessons learned from 2003. The lessons not learned from that fire, forest management, building in the woods in these interface areas,

the Filman report that came out of those 2003 fires suggested a whole raft of things that should be done to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. Many of those things have been frankly ignored by successive provincial governments. And those are lessons that have not been learned. And when I was talking to the fire chief from 2003, earlier this week, he said what he's amazed at is how that fire now doesn't seem that big. 238 homes were lost, but he pointed to fires in California, fires in Lahaina, and I'm sure now he would say this fire that we've all been through in the last 48 hours. The scale of these fires has really changed in the last 20 years. When ours hit, we had some experts come up from Southern California where they had a lot of fires, and they said this is going to become a common occurrence.

Well, I thought they were crazy. They weren't. And, you know, when I look at ours now compared to the magnitude of some of them, like Fort Mac, Hawaii, those kind of things, ours seems small, and I feel very fortunate. We didn't have anybody hurt. So wildfires are an expected part of summertime where you live, things. Ours seems small, and I feel very fortunate we didn't have anybody hurt. So wildfires are an expected part of summertime where you live, but this year's fire season's been just on another level. There are more than 380 active wildfires burning in BC right now. More than a dozen are considered highly visible or threatening to public safety. And

before we say goodbye, Chris, I'm curious if you think there's anything singular happening right now in the context of the other fires. Does this feel different? It feels different because it is different. It is different and it will all forest ecologists and climate scientists say that this will continue to become worse. The conversation that I hear from almost everybody is I thought climate change would be my children's problem. But here it is burning down our neighborhoods. This has brought that conversation right to the fore. And if this kind of conflagration, literal firestorm in communities doesn't make governments and leaders step up and take notice, who knows what will. But this is the conversation I'm hearing is that the climate crisis is not abstract.

It's not somewhere else. It's here. It's now. And it did what you have seen happen. Now, it's hard to pin one event to climate change, but there's essentially no question that this whole situation was made, was exacerbated, was made worse by heat, by drought, and by forest management. So, you know, these are conversations that are going to happen in the future, but that's the conversation that's already happening, even as people wait to find out whether their homes have burned down or not. Okay, Chris, I hope you and your family stay safe. Thank you so much for doing this. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

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50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Farther north from Kelowna, more than 230 fires are burning in the Northwest Territories. As of Saturday, about 65% of the entire population was under evacuation order. Juanita Taylor is senior reporter for The National in the North, and she's been covering the story. senior reporter for The National in the North, and she's been covering the story. Hi Juanita, thank you so much for doing this.

Hi Tamara, happy to be here. So you've been reporting on these fires for over a week now, and they've displaced so many people. The community of Hay River has been evacuated twice since May, And I'm wondering, what have people told you about how they're doing? What's stood out to you? Well, Tamara, it's their resiliency. Northerners have so much resiliency. Let me explain. I'm in Fort Providence today. That's about 300 kilometers from Yellowknife. And it's here where I've been speaking to residents who have had to flee the city. The 19,000 people who have left Yellowknife so far and have gone to Alberta for refuge, some of them didn't want to go that far. I mean, Edmonton is over 1400 kilometers from Yellowknife,

Calgary is over 1700 kilometers from Yellowknife. And there's a small group of people who have chosen to stay at the campgrounds outside of Fort Providence. Some are staying in the hotel where I'm at today. Others have family here in Fort Providence and they're staying with them. Like Elder Bessa Blondin, her reasons for coming to Fort Providence are more deep and personal. You could have gone further south where most people have evacuated to, but you've chosen to come here to Fort Providence are more deep and personal. You could have gone further south where most people have evacuated to but you've chosen to come here to Fort Providence. How come? Because I love the north. I don't want to leave it even for disaster. I'm there to be responsible also to to help. So I'll make sure that this is a good place to stay. So we don't know yet whether the fire

is actually going to hit the capital Yellowknife, but what kind of damage has been done to other communities in the Northwest Territories so far? Well, we know that in the Hamlet of Enterprise, about 95% of that community has been destroyed by wildfire. Other communities like in Hay River, there's like a subdivision of Hay River and that as well has been impacted by wildfires this summer. Homes have been destroyed there. But in the other communities that are currently under evacuation orders, Tamara, they are still very close to being touched by fire, but no damage yet reported in those communities. Okay. And so last week, Yellowknife started evacuating its population, over 20,000 people, and the Friday noon deadline was about making sure that everyone

made it out before the fire arrived, according to the mayor, Rebecca Alte. If there's an emergency, we really want to focus on the emergency at hand and not doing the emergency evacuation. So really encourage folks. I know it's really hard, but please pack your bags, head out. What have been the biggest challenges in those evacuation efforts? I would say just the scope of this evacuation, like over 20,000 people, Tamara, that is huge for the Northwest Territories. It's the largest city in the Northwest Territories. And combine that with the distance to send people to safe locations and, you know, the lack of road

infrastructure. We only have one highway that connects the north to the south and, you know, the lack of road infrastructure, we only have one highway that connects the north to the south and, you know, with only one lane in each direction. And Tamara, we've seen those incredible pictures of long convoys of vehicles, you know, when people started leaving Yellowknife. And, you know, another challenge has been for those people who don't want to leave Yellowknife. Officials say that over a thousand people have chosen to stay behind in the city. And so they worry for their safety. And of course, they worry for the efforts that officials will have to use on people if they need it, rather than, you know, fighting the fire if it does come to that. So of course, to Mayor, they are still encouraging people to get out on an evacuation plane, which are still being offered. You talked about there only being the one highway out of Yellowknife that's going south.

And you mentioned these big distances that people are traveling. Like I know it's a 15-hour drive to Edmonton, for example. Can you describe for me what that drive is like for people making their way down to Alberta? Yeah, so I would say from Yellowknife and up to about 50 to 60 kilometers from Yellowknife, that is where it is the most tense. So that is where you will see flare-ups. That's where you'll see the smoke from that huge wildfire. We also saw a roadblock probably, I don't know, I would say maybe 70 kilometers from Yellowknife.

They've got that set up just in case the fire does get more intense and does get closer to Yellowknife where they will have to block that highway and prevent anyone from going into the direction of Yellowknife. I'm just in shock, really. You know, like when I'm packing, I'm focused, but when I have a minute to stop and somebody asks me how I'm doing, I'm like this. So I'm just emotional. I'm really emotional.

The other big hurdle for evacuations from what I understand is connectivity issues and how to communicate emergency measures to people across so much land. And how have things like cell reception and Internet access affected emergency communication and evacuation efforts? internet access affected emergency communication and evacuation efforts? Well, for example, Tamara, the wildfire that destroyed the Hamlet of Enterprise last week, that fire also destroyed the telecommunications infrastructure, cutting off communication for a number of those communities that are currently under an evacuation order. But thankfully, that has been fully restored. But something a little bit more serious right now is the community of Kikiza. An evacuation order has just been ordered for that community. I think it's probably one of our smallest communities in the Northwest Territories, less than 100 people live there. But once that evacuation order was issued on Thursday, 24 hours later, it wasn't clear if everyone had left because

they have no cell service or internet connection, their phone lines are down. And because no one had showed up to the evacuation center set up in Fort Simpson, well, that kind of made some people worried, wondering if they had heard that they were under an evacuation order. So someone from here in Fort Providence drove the 70 kilometers to Kikiza to check and to make sure folks had heard about this order. But sure enough, people there were still living their daily lives, not knowing that they were told to leave because of a wildfire burning 14 kilometers from their community. They've since left Kikiza, but of course, very worrisome in their case. Yeah, cutting it very close. So right now, there are thousands

of people who've been evacuated who don't know what they're going to come home to. And I know it's early, but what do we know about what the future holds for these communities at this point in time? I wish I had an answer. I don't. It's very hard to predict at this time because of where the fires are at. And, you know, we rely heavily on these updates, these daily updates from the territorial government giving us information as to where the fires are at, what the firefighters are doing to keep the fire at bay and how they're protecting the communities. But at this time, we just don't know. It's a waiting game and it's creating anxiety and uncertainty. But like I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of resiliency

and we are just hoping and praying for the best. Yeah. And before we go, Juanita, I know that there is a song that you wanted to share. Can you just tell me a bit about it? I spoke with an elder yesterday, Besha Blondin, who I mentioned earlier. She's from Yellowknife, and she's here in Fort Providence visiting her family and waiting out the evacuation order here. And she has so much to say, and she is a very wise woman. And she's actually somebody a lot of people in the Northwest Territories turn to for advice. And she offered a prayer song right in the middle of the field next to the Mackenzie River. It was a very beautiful and very candid moment for me. And she allowed me to record her prayer song.

Juanita, thank you so much for your work on this. I know it hasn't been easy. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you, Tamara. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kendacker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.