At 9pm (PST) I was alerted to my old stomping ground was trending on Twitter. Kamloops, BC was where I lived for over ten years and my children still live and work there. I left there to live on my even older stomping ground, Vancouver Island where I grew up as a teen. So when I saw the city on the list, I clicked on it and stared in horror at the tweets I was seeing.
BC is burning...again. We seem to go through this every year now. Beginning in May the wildfires start and they don’t stop until mid to late September. Most years the fires have been isolated communities of only a few scattered people and lots of uninhabited wilderness, but lately we’ve lost towns. And usually the main cities in the interior of BC...Prince George, Kelowna and Kamloops host all the evacuees from the towns and outlying areas. Not this year.
This year not just towns and small communities are in danger of burning to the ground, but the cities and suburbs are. Even the highways are ablaze:
Britton Creek is the midpoint rest stop between Hope and Merritt on the Coquihalla Highway, the 4 lane highway that runs from the city of Vancouver right up to Kamloops and beyond to Kelowna. It’s now closed. And there was a rockslide on the other highway , highway 5 (a two lane road actually) that goes from the interior to the coast.
But that wasn’t bad enough...the city of Merritt is under evacuation alert...the entire city! So is the whole town of Spallumcheen, Logan Lake was evacuated a week ago...the whole township.
This is what it looks like in Armstrong:
Spallumcheen this afternoon:
And west Kelowna is under evac alert:
FYI...John Horgan is the Premier of BC and used to live in Kelowna.
And these fires are not the only ones. There are fires all thru the 70 and 100 Mile House area and even around Fernie:
And now it looks like Kamloops is also being threatened by fire. Evacuation alerts were posted for the area my kids live in just 4 hours ago. So now I’m nervous, frightened and going to be up all night watching the Twitter feed and other government sites for info. My kids know to come to me if they have to leave. They have to go to the coast anyway. Kamloops is already bursting at the seams from evacs.
It looks like I’ll be up all night keeping watch on the government info sites and hoping my kids stay safe and don’t have to leave in the middle of the night.
Interactive map of BC wildfires: governmentofbc.maps.arcgis.com/…
BC Emergency Info: twitter.com/…
BC Wildfire Service: twitter.com/...
Monday, Aug 16, 2021 · 11:19:42 PM +00:00 · Gwennedd
Some good news and bad:
First off...the town of Logan Lake is breathing a sigh of relief right now. The town survived without any losses to structures. It was a REALLY close one!!
The weather has turned damp and rainy and cool. Unfortunately along with the rain comes lightning and winds. That ups the risks in the Kamloops area considerably.
Other small towns and one larger one 37 north of Kamloops is also now under an evacuation alert ( not an Order, yet). This means that Kamloops is threatened on two fronts...one east ( Logan Lake area) the other north ( Barriere and two towns just south of it).
I have not heard anything from my kidlets who are both at work right now ( and not frantically texting their mother). Likely I’ll hear from them this evening.
Thank you all for your outpouring of love and concern. You guys are wonderful! I wish the fires in my province and in Oregon and California weren’t happening, but they are and there will be terrible consequences for some. And hopefully we’ll manage to dal well with climate change so these terrible wildfires become an only occasional occurrence, not a vast and deadly yearly event for months on end.