The out-of-control Ainslie Creek wildfire north of Boston Bar, B.C., has destroyed at least seven buildings, including four homes or seasonal cabins, an official with the Fraser Valley Regional District said Friday amid a spike in wildfire activity in the province that also included an evacuation order in the Cariboo region.
The Thompson-Nicola Regional District said Friday that the Fiftynine Creek wildfire near Big Bar Lake was “rapidly escalating” as it upgraded an early alert to an order.
The order covers more than 100 addressed properties, including all properties around Big Bar Lake and the campground at Big Bar Lake Park.
By Friday evening, the number of active blazes in British Columbia had reached 99, with at least 81 sparked in the past 24 hours due to lightning strikes.
Provincial officials had warned earlier this week of the potential for a significant increase in wildfire activity due to the lightning strikes that have since swept across B.C.’s south, combined with very dry, hot conditions.
A statement from the BC Wildfire Service on Friday said the province saw more than 4,000 recorded lightning strikes that day as of 4 p.m.
Patricia Ross, chair of the board of directors for the Fraser Valley Regional District, said more losses from the Ainslie Creek fire may be confirmed once it’s safe to conduct further assessments.
Ross said in an interview on Friday that it had looked last weekend like fire crews were starting to get a handle on the two fires that make up the Brunswick complex near Boston Bar, about 200 kilometres northeast of Vancouver. But winds picked up again, howling through the Fraser Canyon and fanning the flames.
The shift prompted wildfire officials on Thursday to order the evacuation of the town site of Boston Bar, a community of about 170 residents, while elevated fire behaviour forced crews to pull back and prioritize structure protection.
“It is so dynamic, and things can change very, very rapidly. We need to make sure that people have enough time to be ready and enough time to get out of there,” Ross said of the decision to upgrade to an evacuation order. “You don’t want to be waiting for the last minute because that exit route could be cut off.”
Gordon Robinson, a fire information officer assigned to the Brunswick complex, said conditions were cooler and more humid on Friday, allowing crews to restart their direct attack on the blazes that together span just over 200 square kilometres.
The primary threat to the Boston Bar town site was the Brunswick Creek fire, burning on the west side of the Fraser River, he said in an interview.
“The concern for that is if it were to grow to the south, and then with a strong west wind, the risk is that it could throw embers across the river.”
Robinson said it was the combination of aggressive fire behaviour, the forecasted breakdown of the high-pressure ridge and the passage of the storm that triggered the upgraded evacuation order for Boston Bar, out of an abundance of caution.
Jagdip Singh Bihal has chosen to remain behind in Boston Bar to run his business, JB’s Drive-In Restaurant. He’s been providing coffee, water and food for police and firefighters, with whom he said he’s in regular communication.
Bihal said he could see several helicopters dumping water on flames visible on the mountain slope just across the Fraser River from his restaurant.
Crews had installed sprinklers around the business and his home, Bihal said.
“We’re going to wait and watch,” he said, noting he would leave with his son and several employees if the situation got worse.
It’s been scary at times, he said, but he’s comforted by the firefighters in town.
“They’re working around us, going here and there, saying hello to each other, like a family, right?” he said, reached by phone at the restaurant on Friday.
“They come here to help us, and we are open to help them too.”
Robinson, with the wildfire service, said more settled weather was aiding crews on Friday, but the forecast suggested the reprieve would be short-lived.
“There isn’t like a big storm and wind event in the forecast like we had (Thursday), but we’re going to go back to that hot, drying kind of conditions,” he said.
Environment Canada, meanwhile, issued severe thunderstorm advisories for several regions on Friday, including much of Vancouver Island, the Peace region in B.C’s northeast and a swath of the Interior from the far southeast to the Cariboo region.
Ross said the evacuation order in the Boston Bar area included 450 properties, though some are uninhabited.
She said she was aware that some people had chosen to remain in their homes and businesses, in contravention of the evacuation order.
“We’re not unsympathetic. It must be incredibly hard,” she said. “People are trying to stay behind and do their best.
“But they’re not just putting themselves at risk, they’re putting the first responders at risk as well,” she said.
The Ainslie Creek blaze had already ripped through the Blue Lake Resort earlier this month, destroying several structures, including the home of operations manager Saeed Mansouri and his wife, who left before the fire roared in.
Mansouri told The Canadian Press he had lost everything in the fire, including decades of poetry written in his native Farsi language and photos of his childhood.
He praised the efforts of the firefighters but said the blaze “was so big” there was nothing that could be done to prevent the devastating outcome.
Hundreds of homes remain under evacuation orders and alerts at several locations across the province, including Pemberton, B.C., where a wildfire discovered Wednesday continued to loom above the community of about 3,400 residents.
The village issued an update Friday saying the BC Wildfire Service had requested additional resources to bolster its response to the blaze and ensure the local fire department wasn’t stretched thin while continuing to respond to regular 911 calls.
An existing evacuation order for the One Mile Lake Park area remained unchanged, as did an evacuation alert for parts of the village.
Emily Fardad with the BC Wildfire Service said on Thursday that crews had made progress on the blaze spanning about one square kilometre outside Pemberton, about 30 kilometres north of Whistler, and no structures were at risk at the time.
While cooler temperatures and higher humidity levels were expected to dampen fire activity on Friday, a warming and drying trend was forecasted to return from Sunday, the wildfire service said in an update posted online.
