Thousands of people from communities all around Lake Okanagan have been forced to leave ahead of the rapidly advancing Bald Range wildfire in British Columbia. In a live update, CBC's Tanya Fletcher, reporting from Vancouver, said the story was developing so quickly that the situation kept shifting, and boiled it down to two headline numbers: roughly 20,000 people affected by evacuation orders in the area, and a fire that has grown exponentially.
The timeline of the fire's growth has been fast and furious. People first started noticing smoke and flames around 5 p.m. local time the previous day, and within three hours the fire had exploded to 50 square kilometres. By midnight, the municipality of Summerland itself was ordered to evacuate, and by early Saturday morning the B.C. Wildfire Service was showing the blaze at nearly 95 square kilometres, meaning it is spreading very quickly through a populated area.
Fletcher broke down where the roughly 20,000 evacuees are coming from. The entire district of Summerland, which includes the municipality and has a population of 12,000, has been ordered to leave in full. On top of that, another 8,000 people just to the north, a little closer to Peachland, have also been placed under an evacuation order as the fire pushes across the region.
The Bald Range fire is only part of a much wider active fire zone in the Okanagan. To the north, along the same lake, the Bradley fire and another twin fire have been burning over the past week and have already caused mass evacuations. To the south, closer to the U.S.-Canada border, a wildfire from Washington state has been pushing closer to the B.C. border, adding to the displacement, though officials say Bald Range is now the focus and the most impactful right now.
For those in the fire's path, the escape has at times required extraordinary measures. Fletcher said crews had heard that around 50 people had to be airlifted out to safety, presumably by helicopter, the night before, though details were still being gathered. Many others were removed through tactical evacuations, which she explained is when officials go door to door, banging on doors and telling residents to get out now, with assistance where needed.
Evacuees have described the frightening and unpredictable behaviour of the flames. One person recounted watching the fire as they left, saying that every now and again it would burst out in flame within the smoke and then die down, going black before flaring up again. It was a continual up and down, the evacuee said, that made it very hard to gauge what was actually happening.
The timing has compounded the impact. It is a weekend in the middle of August, and the Okanagan is the face of summer tourism in B.C., a region of wineries with many people on vacation and large numbers of tourists in the area. But as the anchor noted, it is not just visitors who are affected: people live there year-round, and now they too have to vacate their homes as the fire continues its rapid, fluid advance.