Heather Vernon remembers seeing smoke coming up over the hill last August as a wildfire spread near her home.
She had been evacuated from her home before. In fact, she said it typically happens once each summer, as there is only one road in and out of her West Kelowna neighbourhood.
But this time was different.
“It was scary,” she said. “The police came up here and they were like ‘you have to leave now.'”
She grabbed the essentials, and left.
That fire, dubbed the McDougall Creek wildfire, started about 10 kilometres north of West Kelowna, a city of about 33,000 people, on Aug. 15, 2023. It grew quickly and fiercely, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents from their homes.
Heavy smoke filled the air and people watched from afar as the fire approached the community, burning trees and structures along the way — structures the community continues to rebuild one year later.
According to the B.C. Wildfire Service’s 2023 wildfire summary, the fire burned nearly 140 square kilometres of land.
A couple of smaller buildings on Vernon’s property were lost to the fire, but her home was spared. Many of her neighbours were not so lucky.
Tammy Thomas’s home, an older building with high ceilings and open space, burned down, leaving nothing behind, not even flora and fauna.
“The land, it’s still hard to look at,” Thomas said. “You might get your home back, but this won’t change.”
An estimated 189 structures were lost to the McDougall Creek wildfire alone in 2023 — almost half of the total number of properties lost to wildfires provincewide. The fire contributed to the most destructive and costly wildfire season on record in B.C.
The local fire department, along with about 500 firefighters from other areas, joined in the fight against the McDougall Creek fire, according to the City of West Kelowna.
Fire Chief Jason Brolund said it was a fire his crews had been preparing for for 10 years.
He said he often thinks of the firefighters from nearby Wilson’s Landing, many of whom lost their own homes while battling the blaze.
“We think all the time about the West Kelowna residents that lost homes. We drive through those neighbourhoods and think ‘Was there something more that we could have done?’ But there wasn’t.”
The fight against the McDougall Creek wildfire lasted more than a month.
On Sept. 24, 2023, the fire was considered “held” by firefighters, and it was no longer considered a wildfire of note — a fire that poses a threat to human safety or is highly visible.
Local states of emergency ended shortly thereafter, and emergency operations centres were deactivated.
And while the immediate threat was over, the community was left to figure out how to return to normal life, or at least as normal as possible.
1 year later
The city and residents continue to recover and rebuild one year later.
According to the city’s website, it has been working to remove trees that pose a fire risk, a process that’s expected to last into the fall.
Brolund has been taking every opportunity he can to educate residents and people in other communities about the importance of fire-smarting properties — that is, ensuring homeowners have done everything they can to protect their homes from wildfire.
He even went to New York to share his experience, and his concern about climate change, with the United Nations.
It’s been eight months since catastrophic fires tore through West Kelowna, destroying hundreds of homes. For West Kelowna Fire Chief Jason Brolund, there are important lessons to learn, particularly in the area of mitigation work to remove wildfire fuels in forested areas. CBC’s Sarah Penton met up with Brolund in a regional park that was hit by the McDougall Creek fire last August.
Thomas, ever the optimist, plans to rebuild her home, bigger and better, in the same spot.
“We love this place,” she said.
But a lot of her neighbours don’t plan to return, she said.
West Kelowna Fire Rescue also has a new building in the works — a new fire hall.
“Coming out of that disaster, I think there’s been a lot of difficult times for the firefighters, but we’ve come together and this new fire hall is a small something that we have this year that we didn’t last year, which is a bit of a positive for us,” Brolund said.
The old fire hall was built in the ’70s, Brolund said, before full-time firefighters were needed in the community.
“I went to preschool in the basement of the old hall,” Brolund said.
The new space is being built just around the corner from the old hall, to ensure close proximity to as many homes as possible.
It will be double the size and will also include a community gathering space.
“It won’t be extravagant, but it will be what we need to do our job, with room to expand,” Brolund said.
“It’s not the building that makes the fire department, it’s the people.”