Lower East Adams Wildfire continues to grow as evacuation alerts issued

A Shuswap area fire that’s been burning for more than a week has prompted a series of evacuation alerts.

BC Wildfire officials said they recommended the alert for the Lower East Adams Wildfire Thursday as a precautionary measure to local governments, including the Thompson Nicola Regional District, the Columbia Shuswap Regional District and the Adams Lake Indian band, and they followed suit.

“This fire was first detected on July 12 and it is still currently estimated to be about 70 hectares in size and it is still classified as out of control,” Melanie Bibeau, a BC Wildfire information officer, said.

“For this wildfire, terrain and access have been challenging and the area has been deemed as unsafe for this fire. As a result, we are unable to have ground personnel on-site at this time.”

The safety of firefighters, she said, is the top priority and “ground personnel will be responding to this incident only if the conditions are deemed safe enough to do so.”

There are helicopters on site bucketing water onto the blaze, however.

“Today we did observe a bit of growth to the northeast and as a result of that we may see an increase in the fire size later on today,” she said.

The fire behaviour on site Friday is mostly rank two, which would be considered a bigger surface fire with some pockets of moderate and more vigorous surface fire.

The largest part of the evacuation alert covers 92 properties, both vacation and full-time residences, in the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, communications coordinator Tracy Hughes said.

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“This alert was put in largely out of an abundance of caution because it’s a boat-in community only and there’s a ferry service,” Hughes said.

“So we know that transportation in and out is a bit of a pinch point and we really wanted to give these residents a good heads up that they can be moving things out. If they’re moving their trailers out, if they have water toys that they’re wanting to move out, now is a good time to do that.”

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From what she’s heard, the good news is that the fire is growing away from homes.

That said, getting a grab-and-go in place is recommended.