It’s been a year since the Adams Lake East wildfire merged with the Bush Creek wildfire, devastating the North Shore area of the Shuswap.
When all was said and done, the fire destroyed 176 homes and damaged 50 more, affecting 12,000 residents.
Today, life is returning to normal, but the event cast a long shadow.
Derek Sutherland, the general manager of community and protective services for the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, said building is underway throughout the region, though the community is far from healed.
“The people that live in those communities are incredibly resilient and resourceful, and so they’re working to rebuild their homes and their lives,” Sutherland said.
“Some have decided to leave, and most have decided to stay and rebuild what they had before. So we’re trying to support those communities and those residents in their rebuilding efforts.”
Sutherland said the regional district is doing what it can to make sure the process is as smooth as possible from their perspective. They have dedicated staff to the residents in North Shore for rebuilding applications, and are prioritizing getting those applications through the system as quickly as possible.
Memories of those catastrophic days, however, will likely be around long after the rebuilding effort is complete. He remembers how the blaze started ripping through several communities in the area.
“The fire travelled something like 20 kilometres and 12 hours, and was fuelled by the wind, and it was absolutely awful, and it burned out of control for a very long time,” Sutherland said.
He said today it’s fresh in the minds of those who lived through it including Clay Salter.
“That whole hill was on fire over there so I just jumped in the truck and left,” Salter told Global News.
The Scotch Creek resident lost his mobile home at the Scotch Creek Estates mobile home park where all but one unit were levelled.
He’s been living in an RV for months and anxiously waiting for the park owner to get permits for his modular home.
‘It’s taking a long time, hard to live in something like this, wife and I and two little dogs, drives you crazy,” he said.
“I think everybody that was touched by this is forever changed, and it is definitely fresh in the minds of the people that were a part of the response,” Sutherland said.
Sutherland said there were around 37 working to manage the evacuation and support of residents and it affected everybody in the tightknit community. And from his role at the helm of the Emergency Operations Centre, it was hard to know exactly how the whole thing would play out.
“Trying to gain situational awareness of this fire was incredibly challenging,” he said.
“Of course, helicopters couldn’t fly for days because of the smoke conditions, and it was so hazy, we couldn’t get a really good sense of what was going on following the the firestorm coming through the community.”
There were 8,000 residents who had been evacuated within the boundaries of the regional district alone and offering the right support came with challenges.
“I can’t say enough about the good work that the team did to support the residents that were evacuated from those fires,” he said.
“The team had never managed an evacuation of that magnitude before, but they were completely up for the challenge, and I couldn’t be prouder of the work that the EOC team did that day.”
That time taught some invaluable lessons, as well.
“We learned that climate change is real, and our communities and our fire situation is ever-evolving,” he said.
“It used to be that putting on an evacuation order in our communities was an incredibly rare event, and it is not anymore. It is a yearly event, and we have to ramp up our emergency operations and our staffing levels to become resilient to our new reality.”