More than two years after a behemoth fire devastated Lytton and the neighbouring Lytton First Nation, cement has finally been poured on the village’s first home rebuild.
Mayor Denise O’Connor said the first residential rebuild permit was issued in the fall and “rebuilding is going to be starting full force” in the coming months.
“It’s been a long, long time. This is the third Christmas people have been displaced from the community,” she told Global News on Thursday. “It was an incredible process around removing the debris. It took so long to get even that started.”
The length of time it has taken for shovels to get into the ground has enraged many Lytton residents, with various archeological, debris removal and remediation delays prompting protest and dominating B.C. headlines.
The June 30 fire killed two people and forced another 300 to flee as it burned through houses, the health centre, the post office, a grocery store, and more.
A number of homes are now slated to be completed in the spring — perhaps as early as February, O’Connor said.
The home currently being rebuilt is Lilliane Graie’s. The former village councillor said she submitted her application in August with help from her builder — a “complex” process that involved zoning bylaws, building plans and moving her house six inches to the south.
“It was one thing after another. We didn’t get started until the spring of 2022 really, and then it was a delay after a delay after a delay,” she said. “There’s no mystery really, it’s just government, cleaning and council delaying.”
Financial support for Lytton residents was slow to come in as well, Graie added.
“I don’t blame anybody at the province because I met so many people who, they just want to help. They just want to get it done. But there were so many people working in silos where, ‘This is my job, I’m doing this, I don’t know what’s going on over there.'”
Bernie Fandrich, president of the Lytton Chamber of Commerce, also expressed frustration with the communication from other parties as well, particularly those charged with the archaeological work.
Plans are in the works now, however, to rebuild the village’s grocery store in additional to the handful homes, he said.
“They’re still working on the water, they’re doing upgrades to some of this water and sewer systems, but they needed upgrades,” he said. “That’s still in progress, but I think as far as the rebuild goes, if a house went up, they could be serviced.”
Criticism has been hurled at the B.C. government in particular for the slow pace of rebuilding, with residents noting that reconstruction in the aftermath of other disasters has gone more quickly. Some have since given up on resettling, selling their properties and moving on, O’Connor added.
“I’ve always said the community-led recovery in a situation like ours really didn’t work, I don’t believe,” the mayor said.
“If a situation like ours ever happened in the future where we lost absolutely everything, that something needs to be done differently in this case.”
Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth has previously called Lytton a “complex site” to rebuild.
In June, Premier David Eby and Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Minister Bowinn Na said B.C. has been supporting debris removal, environmental remediation, and identifying any archaeological findings in the area to protect Nlaka’pamux heritage resources before reconstruction begins.
A number of Lytton homes were built on a site that is culturally significant to the Nlaka’pamux Nation. Findings in the ground could be up to 10,000 years old. A 7,500-year-old spear point and ancestral remains are among the thousands of artifacts uncovered to date.
Other factors, however, have contributed to the delay, including the devastating floods of November 2021, an enormous dump of snow that winter, additional wildfire evacuations this past summer, and months of waiting for toxicology reports, and safe work procedures, and sifting through the wreckage.
Fandrich said he thinks most people still want to come back to Lytton.
“There still is a core here that they want to come back because Lytton was unique, it had a it had a certain feel to it,” he explained.
“It’s a very small town. Everybody knew everybody … You stopped and talked to everybody, went in for a coffee, and that just made the community here. And that’s one of the things everyone really, really misses about Lytton.”
Meanwhile, the Village of Lytton and the Thompson-Nicola Regional District are suing Canada’s two national railways and Transport Canada, alleging they were negligent in letting trains pass through the town during the deadly 2021 heat dome.
The lawsuit says a train passed through the village 18 minutes before the first report of a fire near the tracks that eventually destroyed 90 per cent of the town’s buildings and scorched an additional 837 square kilometres of land.
A 2022 report from the Transportation Safety Board, however, stated investigators could find no evidence that the wildfire was started from a spark from a train.
— with files from Amy Judd
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