Cooler and damper weather has come as a welcome assist to crews working on the McDougall Creek and Glen Lake wildfires, but it’s not a quick fix to the situations at hand.
BC Wildfire information officer Evan Lizotte said that both fires near Central Okanagan communities West Kelowna and Peachland remain out of control, though are in different stages of suppression.
The Glen Lake wildfire is more active, with current mapping indicating it’s still around 763 hectares and six kilometres from Peachland’s town limits. Those numbers, Lizotte said, are the same as a day earlier and that is largely due to smoke cover stopping crews from accurately mapping on Monday.
Once that clears, the fire is expected to come in larger.
Lizotte said that gusty winds of up to 65 kilometres an hour increased fire activity and fire behaviour a lot in the late afternoon on Monday.
“We haven’t been predicting winds to be as high as they have been,” he said. “So we’ve just been keeping that in mind.”
That said, the fire suppression efforts have been significant.
“The fire has had multiple helicopters bucketing over the past few days on the northeast side and booking operations are conducted continuing throughout the day Tuesday,” Lizotte said.
“Heavy equipment is working on establishing a guard along the north flank and up to the east. The fire has not breached the guard at this time. However, we do continue to monitor the area to ensure that there are no spot fires, or if there are, we detect them very early.”
Specialists completed structural protection work around Glen Lake area homes and they are available if required further, he said, and tankers were dropping retardant over the northeast end of the fire.
With the McDougall Creek wildfire near West Kelowna, the fire fight is much further along.
“It’s still considered out of control, however, we were making very good progress on it,” he said. “There hasn’t been much change of our operations on that fire. We continue to work on multiple objectives and patrol and extinguish hotspots that have been identified through infrared scanning and personnel will continue to demobilize non-essential equipment on that fire.”
BC Wildfire has also deployed rehabilitation specialists who are embedded in the area to work on areas where the fire damaged critical infrastructure.
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