The Current - Summerland, B.C. Fires came with speed and violence”

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

A forest fire northwest of Summerland, British Columbia started around dinnertime on August 7th. It’s not unusual for the Okanagan to see fires spark in the summer. But what was unusual was how aggressively it spread, causing more than 20-thousand people to flee. Fires are getting bigger and faster. And they’re causing more devastation. So, residents and politicians are now trying to figure out how to better prepare. CBC’s Sarah Penton explores all that in her documentary, With Speed and Violence.

The nation is watching Alberta, and we know it. I'm Kathleen Petty, host of West of Center. Every week I speak with the people shaping Alberta politics, from pipelines to separation, to help you understand what's going on here and why it matters to the entire country. Pull up a chair and join me, West of Center. Find us and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC. podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It started around dinnertime on August the 7th, a forest fire northwest of Summerland, British Columbia. It's not unusual for the Okinaw Indy Sea fires spark in the summer, but what was unusual was how aggressively this fire spread. Rural communities were evacuated first, but the fire kept moving quickly, and in the middle of the night, everyone in summerland, more than 20,000 people were forced to flee. fires are getting bigger and faster, and they're causing more devastation, and so residents and politicians are now trying to figure out how to better prepare.

The CBC's Sarah Penton brings us her documentary with speed and violence. That's what we're doing, just kind of sifting through and seeing if we could find any little morsel of something that mattered. The morsel Craig Milton is looking for is his wife's necklace. He's using a gold miner's pan. But, yeah, sifting through the rubble, it's pretty futile. The fire's pretty thorough. The rubble is what's left of his house, his office, and his music venue. We had to flee in such a hurry.

It just didn't cross your mind to grab it. And I think part of it was if you could just find this one little thing, it would kind of allow you to close that chapter and move on. But there was no. Nothing there to find. The little things are hard to find, but he can still see remnants of the bigger ones. It's a pool table and pinball machine, and you can see a little bit of my vinyl collection remaining there.

That little ridge, that's all that remains of about 1,400 albums that I've been collecting since I was a child. In what used to be the garage, a burnt out shell of a car that belonged to his wife. That car is a spitfire that my wife got from her father, and it's just probably her most prized possession in the whole world. She'd ride around with her golden retriever at the time and her bare feet in a sundress in this little car. And she was just kind of known for that.

You know, it's one of those things when people say, oh, it's just things. Yeah, some things are just things. You know, your fridge, your stove, your couch, whatever. But some things aren't just things. And, you know, even if you could get another one, it wouldn't replace it. Same as the vinyl for me.

It's hard to get your head around what you're seeing. Complete destruction of buildings. had access to this area when they escaped. But the property slopes up to vegetable gardens and enclosures where the rescue animals live. Goats, sheep, and chickens. It's untouched by fire. There's deep green grass and sunflowers blooming. Our place burned down because of a projectile, a chunk of wood or something was launched from the fire.

Apparently they were landing all over the place. This is my neighbor, Gord, Northcote. Hi, Gord. Howdy? How you doing? Good. We're going to get Ray to do our section there. Gord's house right next door is still standing. He only lost the shop and the fence closest to Craig's property. And in Summerland, when neighbors get together these days, there's one topic that keeps coming up.

I can't believe how fast it moves. It was just insane. If you know where the place where it started is, it just seems impossible. It was so far from here. but then not until your son pulled on and said, it's coming. So here we are sitting here just kind of realizing, oh, maybe we got a, going to have to get out of here. And really two of our communities with people that we know and love were already fully engulfed in fire, and we had no idea. Craig and his wife left in a hurry, and it didn't take long before they got the news,

by phone from one of the neighbors who stayed behind. He just said, you've lost everything kind of thing. And that's how we kind of found out. And he's like, I'm watching your house burn right now. And so kind of we found out in real time when it was happening. And then I was like, well, is everybody's house is burning? You know, like, what's going on? Because we'd seen the pictures from Fowler by this time.

And he's like, no, no, just yours. He's like, oh, okay. That was really kind of weird to understand. Everyone's a bit dazed and confused because by the time they got here, the community was already starting to fill with smoke. And it would an eerie and rather ominous silence actually initially. Here is the emergency operation center,

a room in the basement of the municipal hall. By chance, it had been set up just a week before the fire. So it was ready to go when Summerlands Chief Administrative Officer Graham Statt and the rest of the team arrived that night. And then we started to hear more sirens and more response. Then the phones really started to ring because people were trying to share information. All of a sudden you have 10 phones in the room ringing and people on the phones plus cell phones.

I think BC Wildfire said it went from like a single tree burning to 5,000 acres in an hour. It was an incredible moving with speed and violence, as they say. It was about midnight when he got the call from the fire chief in the BC Wildfire Service. It was time to evacuate the entire municipality. It's never an easy decision because you think, man, it's just the wrong one, right?

The inconvenience and it's not an uncommon thing in the evacuation, people can get hurt, injured, or die because they can be rushing, fall down the stairs, there can be vehicle accidents with huge traffic jams and things. So you have all these seniors living facilities in Summerland in particular. There's complex care, ambulance involvement to move people around. So it's not an easy decision, but you just have to make the best decision you can based on the facts that you have at the time.

And in this case, I think it was the right decision to get everyone out. The next challenge was how to get everyone out in the middle of the night. RCMP and firefighters were knocking on doors and going up and down streets with loudspeakers and sirens. But Graham worried it wasn't enough. First thing I did it went over the fire hall because we wanted to see if we can get our air raid siren working. And so we got the compressor started and figured that out, managed to get the air raid siren working. And that's when he started to see like all kinds of people filling the streets and running out with. suitcases. There's a lot of fear in the area, obviously palpable, fear, traffic jams of people

trying to get out of the community. There's dark, smoke everywhere. The smoke was really, really thick and hard to breathe. The whole emergency center moved to Penticton. He was up for 36 hours that night and the next day managing the response. He's been involved in other emergencies while working in Alberta, Fort McMurray, Slave Lake. But this was the first one that was personal. His own home was in danger. His wife, his kids and grandkids were all forced to leave. I'm kind of in, you know, General Graham mode, which is in the incident commander. I'm focusing this. I'm compartmentalizing. I'm moving like, you just move through decisions. You take things one thing at a time. You're super focused on the incident and probably forgetting a little bit about

the impacts of my own family. Like, you know, you're just moving. Anyways, one guy in the emergency operation center named Shane Hulan could tell that I was struggling that night. And he just put his arms around me and he said, remember, their limits are your limits. So take care of your family too. That was good advice. Graham is back at City Hall now, but there are reminders of the fire. Massive fans run 24 hours a day trying to clear the smell that lingers in the air. Graham thinks Summerland got lucky,

and maybe will be protected from fires now that so much has burned around the community. But he wants governments to learn from what happened and start preparing now to deal with more fast-moving fires like this one. Yeah, well, I certainly know how close it came. And too close. So, I was keeping my window in my office open, listening to the busyness of the community and people out there walking by, hawk and horns

and then an affordable housing project being built across the street from district hall and cranes operating. And, you know, it's good. It's really good. But for people who were in the path of the fire, life is not back to normal. Do you need laundry soap? Uh, yeah. Dish sole.

So these are little, um... Londry salt. Yeah, it doesn't... Barry Ponton is grabbing supplies from a free store set up in Penticton. You need Windex? I grabbed the one bottle of Windex. Volunteers are sorting through piles of donations. Food, cleaning supplies, toys, and clothing.

This is a large sweater. Oh, yeah, I wear sweaters. Yep, I'm sure you do. You're out in bush. Barry lives in the bush, in a bus. His friend, Kathy Hyan, lives in a few. Fifth Wheel close by. We saw a pluma smoke and we said, that's new.

That wasn't there when we came down. And by time we got back up to our place, we could see the smoke was right there and it was already starting to jump the canyon. And they had to wake me up and I was like, huh, huh, huh? And on the radio they said, it's contained. But the wind shifted in about five minutes and we were ready to start pulling our camper out

And we had to stop. We couldn't. We knew that we would be stuck. It was to where we were in like 10 to 15 minutes. When we come down, we had to drive through a tunnel of fire. The fire was already jumping the road, and it was up on the side. And, yeah, so we were driving through flames to get out of there. What was that like?

Surreal, scary. I just concentrated on the bumper that was in front of me, and I didn't look at the flames too much, because I couldn't. I just kept going. Our one buddy, he drove the quad down, and he was all blistered on his arm and his face

from the heat. What did you see? What was that like? Hell. It's the only way you can describe it. It was hot. It was scary. It's all hell. The noises that a fire makes

is just incredible. What it is? Yeah, it sounds like demons. It's like a roaring. A roaring, but it... Yeah, like what you'd hear in the movies. Days later, when they could finally go back, Barry says they found a miracle. The fire had burned around and under his bus, but the bus was still there.

Barry's hands are black, covered in soot and ash from trying to clean up. He looked after us. He saved their fifth wheel, saved my motor home. And we lost all our tools and chainsaws and stuff, and we cut firewood for the winter. sell it. And we lost all that equipment. I lost everything. A lot of clothes that were on the clothes line. But the main thing is, is I got my home. Henry Stubbs wasn't so lucky. He lives in Fowler, the community that burned first. They had a matter of minutes to leave. My wife had everything stored in the car. Around about that time,

the police come in. It's time to go. She can't find her car keys. everything is in the car. So I'm busy trying to pull stuff out of the car. I throw it in my truck along with my two large dogs, which were already in there, and a cop's saying, no more time. So I look up, and the fire is right at my neighbor's place. So we booked it out of there.

And as you were leaving, did you think this is it? I'm not going to see my home again? Yeah. Asphalt roof, cedar siding, cedar soffets. Not a good combination. The nation is watching Alberta, and we know it. I'm Kathleen Petty, host of West of Center. Every week I speak with the people shaping Alberta politics,

from pipelines to separation, to help you understand what's going on here and why it matters to the entire country. Pull up a chair and join me, West of Center. Find us and follow wherever you get your podcasts. He was right. His house, barn, woodshed are all gone. All that's left is the metal. Just right here, Henry.

Is your yours? Yeah. And you got your gift card. So he's here at the free store picking up some supplies, a bit of food and some toiletries. Okay, yep, thank you. Awesome. Perfect. Thanks. Henry still has questions about what happened that night and why he didn't get more warning. I mean, we didn't get an alert until we were miles away.

We were already in our mat on a horse was burned. and most other people's houses were already gone. So I'm not quite sure what happened, what went wrong, but you're supposed to get a heads up that something's happening, and for us it didn't happen. The regional district says there wasn't time to issue an evacuation alert to cell phones. For that, paperwork needs to be put in place, maps drawn out. That night, RCMP officers and search and rescue volunteers were on the ground,

going door to door, executing what's called a tactical. evacuation as the fire raced toward them. The mayor of the District of Summerland remembers the chaos of that night. We didn't get an alert at all. It was straight to an order, get out now. I've never seen that before. Anywhere in the province that there was no alert that you're just ordered to leave. Doug Holmes says he didn't even believe it at first.

When word came down, they needed to get out. I thought, no, it's not possible. I thought that's ridiculous. He was working to get the message out himself on a special CBC broadcast that night. I'm just randomly throwing things in a suitcase right now. Can you tell us people in your area what they need to know? I don't know where 12,500 people are supposed to go, but we need to get out. He soon saw where everyone went.

When you enter Pintycton from Summerland, you pass by lots of parking lots. And all these parking lots were full of RVs and cabs. campers and cars and, okay, well, that's where they're going to put 12,000 people. You know, they're just all camped out in these parking lots. Volunteers mobilized in the middle of the night. But Penticton was hosting a big summer festival, so there weren't enough hotel rooms available. Doug Holmes admits the first few days were tough.

You know, people getting registered with the emergency support services, you know, getting hotel rooms, finding places to stay. you know, just those kind of logistics. And I think it was just the vast scale. There was just so many people. And it happened so fast. So many of the volunteers were evacuees themselves, you know. So it was just all these things kind of added up.

And so it was pretty chaotic the first couple of days. He says communities need to start planning more. If there's going to be more of these large-scale evacuations in the future, which there's no reason to think there won't, you know, towns might need to think about having not just evacuation plans, but also plans for receiving evacuees. I don't think most towns really have those kind of plans. So that might be something we have to think about in the future. In fact, another city in the BC Interior is looking at just that.

The BC government says it's considering a proposal to build a permanent center to house evacuees in Kamloops. Doug Holmes also wants the government to look at transportation routes. You know, we have a lot of roads in this province. It's really long road, mountain roads. They follow valley and then they just stop. They're just one way in and one way out. There's so many stories I heard about people driving through flames to get out.

And I think we need to start thinking about connecting some of these roads somehow because it's so easy to get trapped. We've been quite fortunate, I think, in Canada, that we haven't seen a mass casualty event like that on a wildfire evacuation. Matthew Bourbonnet agrees. that roads are part of the issue. He points to fires in Spain, France, and California, where people have died in their cars while trying to escape.

He's an assistant professor at the Center for Wildfire Coexistence, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of British Columbia's Okinaugan campus. But he thinks there's also more that needs to be done to prepare for the next fast-moving fire. We've put a lot of our focus for decades in purely reactive fire response. most fires don't do what that fire did. We're still really good at containing them and really good at putting them out. We've never put the same emphasis into proactive mitigation. And that is really about thinking about how fire is supposed to behave on our landscapes and what our landscapes probably should look like. And that can be more use of prescribed fire, more use of thinning and forestry to clean up fuels. And working with indigenous communities on using cultural fire. to kind of restore these landscapes because those landscapes we know

were more resilient to fires, even under extreme conditions. Matthew says the extreme conditions now are linked to climate change. Summerland, for example, is experiencing a drought which contributed to the rapid growth of the fire. To see a fire like that go from ignition to 4,000 to 5,000 hectares

and hit a community in an afternoon, that's about as aggressive fire behavior as you'll ever see. but it's something that we're seeing more commonly here in the Okinawag and in the last few years. So I think until we start balancing that ledger, until we start focusing more on making things more resilient, we're going to see more communities get hit like this. Like it is going to happen across Canada. We did ask the BC government for response to the criticisms being leveled after the Bald Range fire.

It says there will be a review to understand what worked and what needs to be better next time. And it pointed to proactive steps it's taking to reduce the risk. That includes forest management, prescribed burns, and the Fire Smart program, which helps communities build fire-resistant homes and neighborhoods. All the trees are trimmed up nicely, and they're all not super flammable trees. That's something that Fire Chief Rob Robinson says helped here in the neighborhood of Cartwright. But also the Hardy Board that's on the side here. They've done all their landscaping in rock, which is awesome.

It's where the fire department made what he calls, their last. stand. Flames were 80 feet high and dangerous. We could see that the wind shifted. I don't know what time it was whenever it was. It came back towards town and we decided to kind of defend and hold in this area where we are now. And if the fire wasn't stopped here, we'd have to burn the town down. Yeah, definitely, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm trying to get a sense of just how much in danger Summerland was that night. Like, it was absolutely crazy, to be honest with you. I've never seen, like I've been I've never seen anything move that fast and that vigorous. That's Martin or Marty Austin.

He's a fire captain with the Summerland Fire Department. Because we were over here fighting a fire, we needed water. The hydrant was being used. I said, well, there's one right across the street from my house. Let's go down there. So we ripped down there just in time to see the barn go up in flames. And it's a really old barn, right? So there's no stopping it.

I'm thinking what can we do? But, I mean, the flames were so high. and so hot. We just had an engine, and there's no way we'd have been able to get close enough to it to do anything. So. The brilliant thing of that night is that Marty watched his houseburn, and then they went on and saved six, seven, eight, nine, ten homes in the next hour, and then went on to save more homes the rest of that night. In the end, 150 structures were lost. I'm very sensitive to that. I'm sad because those homes that were lost were my homes, too. I'm almost embarrassed. But I shouldn't be, but I feel compassionate for those people, and I'm sad for them.

Because I get to go home and they don't. And that's my job is to protect their structures. And I let them down. Still, there's plenty of gratitude in Summerland. Hi, Rob. I'm Jan Shoemaker. Hi, Jen. I'm the second house from the corner. Jan Shoemaker lives a couple of houses away from where we're talking.

I wanted to give you a hug. Okay, I take hugs. You're very welcome. You can see why Jan is so grateful. Less than 100 meters from her backyard, charred trees jut out into the skyline, the earth black. You can see while you're looking up there, there's nothing on the forest floor. It's completely vegetationless. It all burned.

It all burned. But she's grateful to have her home. As for Craig Milton, he's still dealing with the loss of almost everything he owned. You came on the property the first time and you see everything gone, the just, you know, in quotation, things. I really felt kind of erased. Like you're just down there with just you and the bit of clothes you escaped with. And you just feel like all the things that make you, you, are gone, right?

But still, he plans to rebuild, his house and the music venue. My wife and I were married under those two trees. So, yeah, we're fused to this property already. And we knew when we first stood on it that it mattered. to us. And then what we've done here only makes it matter more. But, you know, and also, where do you go? Like, where do you go that doesn't have something, you know, with flooding and fires? And I know the Okanagan's a little worse, but I don't know, we love it here. Today's job is to save some of the plants.

He's trying to pull out all of this dead stuff and give all the new growth a chance to breathe. He's cutting away burned dead leaves and underneath. faith are fresh green shoots. And yeah, it's hard not to be inspired to rebuild when you can see all of the things around us just doing it on their own in the same spot. All of this stuff is since the fire. The documentary was produced by Sarah Penton from CBC Colonna

and Liz Hoth from the CBC Audio Documentary Unit. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. www.ca.com podcasts.