Neighbours, and then the fire department, helped extinguish a shrub fire in Vernon on Tuesday evening.
According to the Vernon Fire Department, lightning from Tuesday evening’s storm was the cause of a fire near 25th Avenue and 14th Street.
A bolt of lightning struck a power pole, and the nearby shrubs caught fire. The fire department says neighbours fought the fire and held it until fire crews arrived and extinguished it.
Meanwhile, the fire chief for the BX Swan Lake Fire Department, Bill Wacey, said they had just finished training when alarms went off.
Fire crews “looked out the window and you could see a huge amount of flame coming out of the trees and some of the people had actually seen the lightning strike,” he said.
Five units were sent to battle the blaze.
“We were up in that vicinity in about 10 to 15 minutes and realized that it was going to be very challenging to access that slope,” said Wacey, who estimated the fire to be approximately 0.5 hectares in size.
Wacey said the fire “was climbing up the slope pretty good,” adding that “our main concern was the wind was swirling around, so it was going straight up the hill and then it would swirl and come back on itself.
“As you can imagine, all the area residents were quite concerned and so we maintained a presence there until about midnight just to alieviate everybody’s mind until the fire actually sat down.”
No homes were threatened by the fire.
“We were very lucky because even this morning we didn’t have a lot of wind, and that’s always the big element in the room; what the wind can do to the fire.”