Chris Erickson is one of many who lost their homes in the McDougall Creek fire that hit West Kelowna and area on Aug. 17 and Aug. 18.
An evacuation alert was issued on the evening of Wednesday, Aug. 16. However, initially Mr. Erickson said he and his wife were not too worried.
“We didn’t know about [the alert] until Thursday morning,” he told The Epoch Times. “We kind of kept an eye on it, and half prepared some things.”
He and his wife also thought it might also be possible the fire would take another direction, but things changed that afternoon.
“I remember walking up in the afternoon, and my wife was ‘this doesn’t look right—we need to go.’ We looked at it—just a massive, I mean just massive column of smoke coming in from behind the house, like basically on our backyard … and when you’re that close to it, you see the smoke just billowing up, you’re like, this is not good,” he said.
“And there was a change in the air, like you could just feel that something was going to go wrong.”
Following the Aug. 16 evacuation alert for West Kelowna and surrounding areas, a full-blown evacuation order was issued the next day after the fire’s exacerbation by high winds. As of Aug. 22, the fire had burned over 12,000 hectares.
The Ericksons left before the evacuation order was put in place and subsequently heard about it on the road.
Mr. Erickson said he did what he could to prepare the house, such as switching off gas and electricity and moving propane tanks into the garage as a precaution.
“When you leave the house, you’re not thinking to yourself, ‘Well, this is the last time I’m going to see any of that stuff’—there’s no way your mind is going there,” he said. The couple left with a small amount of luggage.
“My wife managed to grab a couple of family memorabilia things,” he said. “So, there’s a lot that was lost.”
They initially stayed in Merritt, about 120 kilometres west of Kelowna, before getting a place in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland.
Like so many of those evacuated, they were desperate for news on what had happened to their home and their community. For almost two full days, the couple went without news.
“We didn’t know, but we suspected,” he said. “We were preparing for the worst, but we really didn’t know, and that not-knowing is really difficult.” He said they pored through social media, but there simply wasn’t much information.
Then came the news they had feared. A neighbour called Aug. 19 to tell them their home of four years had been destroyed by the fire.
They watched the footage of their home being engulfed, taken from the camera on their neighbour’s front door. Mr. Erickson said it was difficult.
“We could see … our house on fire. And in the middle of the video, the whole roof and the whole structure collapses. So, it was pretty definitive at that point. … We had seen an image earlier in the day that gave us an indication that our house was in trouble. It hadn’t burned at that point. But we were like, we'd better be prepared for this,” he said, adding that the power of the fire was overwhelming.
“Having seen the flames on our house, I don’t even know if we’re going to be able to recover anything. I mean, there’s almost no words for it. It was just devastating to watch. Just the size of those flames pouring out of our house was just incredible,” he said.
For now, he said, they are just trying to cope with the loss of their home, wondering where they are going to live, navigating insurance, and contemplating their future.
“We’re kind of taking it literally day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute,” he said. “There are moments when we’re like, it’s going to be OK. Then there are other moments.”
Despite cooler, wetter weather in B.C.s southern Interior on Aug. 22 and 23, firefighters continue to battle a number of significant wildfires, including the Bush Creek East blaze in the Shuswap region.
The rain aided firefighters combating the McDougall Creek fire near Kelowna, and the province has lifted travel restrictions to most communities in the southern Interior other than West Kelowna.
‘It Was Horrific’
The details of Christine Elliott’s experience with the fire were different than that of the Ericksons—but just as devastating.Ms. Elliott, 70, had recently retired and moved to West Kelowna. She had found a place to rent, and was just settling down to enjoy her retirement.
Ms. Elliott and the people she was staying with could see the McDougall Creek fire getting closer, and when the order came to evacuate the evening of Aug. 17, she grabbed some luggage and loaded up her vehicle.
But much like Mr. Erickson, she was not too alarmed.
“It wasn’t like trees burning on the side of the house, for example. So OK, it’s an evacuation order, grabbed some stuff … a suitcase, important papers, medication, that type of thing, and that’s about it. Put it in your vehicle and get away. So that’s what we did,” she said.
But that night, everything changed.
“It was horrific. It was like a beast. It’s like a dragon that just came and blew fire along the whole ridge. And then the wind changed direction, and that was the end of it. That was the torch, that was the whole thing that took it away,” she said.
Ms. Elliott said she was living in Kelowna in 2003, another year when a serious fire threatened the community. She believes this one was worse.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. And it was the wind. It was the dir
ection of the wind and the force of the wind that changed the whole equation,” she said. “When we were evacuated and left, there was no thought in anybody’s mind that the fire is going to come down and ravage and incinerate everything. … It was just like a dragon breathing fire that came out of nowhere.”
She said the only thing left of the house she was staying in was the chimney. Because she had recently moved, she had not yet got renter’s insurance, and everything she had in the house is gone.
“It’s very overwhelming and emotional and a person like me, that has managed to get through life, sometimes just paycheck to paycheck, but I got through life … and I was looking forward to the golden years … and then all of a sudden, now that is wiped off the face of the earth,” she said.
Ms. Elliott said she is still trying to process everything that’s happened.
“You’re living your life in your home with everything that you’ve had, all your belongings, all your memories, all your cherishable items … then all of a sudden, you become homeless in the car with a suitcase.”
She is staying at a hotel in Kelowna and is not sure what the future holds.
One bright spot, she said, has been the outpouring of concern and care—both from emergency workers and ordinary people.
“Everybody’s stepping up, and the community and the people and everybody trying their best to help everybody else … and that’s humanity and what we should really be caring about and doing in our lives, in our world,” she said.
Mr. Erickson had similar thoughts. For years, he said, he worked as a political science professor and watched a growing divide in society. But he said in the face of the tragedy, all of that seems to have fallen away.
“I was really impressed with how people have rallied and how people have come together,” he said. “People just kind of recognizing that these are human beings, just like every other human being and they need help. … This is the Canada that I remember from being a little kid here.”
