Some Boston Bar business owners staying back despite evacuation order

BOSTON BAR, B.C. — Gurvinder Badyal operates the Canyon Alpine Motel in Boston Bar, whose residents were ordered to evacuate on Thursday morning after a wildfire that has been threatening the community this month erupted aggressively overnight.

But Badyal says she isn’t going anywhere, not yet at least.

She said she was among several local business owners choosing to stay despite the evacuation order.

Badyal said they wanted to protect their properties from the fires, looters and anything else.

“The owners are all here and whoever wants to stay here. I mean, they can’t put us in cuffs and take them away, but we are under (evacuation) order. And we’re ready, we’re all packed. We’re ready to leave if we have to,” she said.

Badyal is also staying for another reason; her motel is hosting about 35 firefighters.

“They’re trying to help us as much as they can. We have sprinklers installed by them on my whole property,” she said of the “brave” firefighters who have been working roughly 12-hour shifts each night before coming back to the motel to sleep.

The evacuation order for the town site about 200 kilometres northeast of Vancouver came after fire starts flared elsewhere across the province, amid hot and stormy weather.

They include a fire that has sent columns of smoke looming over Pemberton where an evacuation order and alerts were issued around midnight Wednesday.

The BC Wildfire Service’s dashboard on Thursday afternoon showed about 35 active blazes across British Columbia, including 20 that started in the previous 24 hours, most sparked by lightning in southern B.C. that had been the subject of dire warnings this week.

But the Pemberton fire is thought to have been human caused, and while the focus was on new fire starts, the Brunswick complex of fires has been threatening Boston Bar since early this month.

The complex consisting of the Brunswick Creek and Ainslie Creek fires had already triggered a series of evacuation orders and alerts involving hundreds of properties, but the order issued Thursday morning extended the evacuation to about 200 properties in and around the town site, which is home to about 170 residents.

Evacuees were told to head south via Highway 1, away from the fires that have now closed the highway to the north. The Fraser Valley Regional District said people in need of support should head to the Shxwháy Village community centre in Chilliwack.

The B.C. Wildfire Service said in an update that it expected “aggressive fire behaviour” from the complex to continue.

Badyal said she hasn’t seen any flames, but the smoke is thick.

“We could barely breathe here,” she said.

In Pemberton, Mila De, a manager at the Pemberton Hotel in the downtown core, said the fire there was bad enough on Wednesday that she started packing up her car, preparing to flee.

“I was really freaking out,” she said when reached by phone Thursday.

Flames and heavy smoke columns could be seen just outside the community of about 3,400 residents that is famous for its outdoor recreation and serves as a bedroom community for the resort of Whistler, which is about 30 kilometres southwest.

The wildfire service said the Signal Hill wildfire had grown rapidly to 38 hectares, up from 10 hectares overnight, and perimeter maps appeared to show it was about three kilometres from the town centre.

The Village of Pemberton issued the evacuation order late Wednesday night for the One Mile Lake Park area, while evacuation alerts from the village and the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District for much of Pemberton were also in effect, warning residents to be ready to leave at short notice.

The service said in an update that the fire was not immediately threatening structures, and helicopters and an air tanker worked through the night to combat the blaze.

The spike in fire activity came amid warnings of heightened risks from dry lightning across the southern Interior into Friday.

Heat warnings are in effect for B.C.’s Fraser Canyon and southern Interior, where temperatures were forecast to reach the mid to high 30s, as well and parts of the Peace River region in the northeast where temperatures in the low 30s were predicted.

Air-quality warnings due to wildfire smoke were also in effect for the Fraser Canyon, Nicola and South Thompson regions.

Environment Canada meteorologist Colin Fong said Wednesday that it had been so dry that any falling rain typically evaporated before hitting the ground, making ignition from lightning a higher risk.

While the province’s fire season has so far been moderate, the wildfire service’s director of operations Cliff Chapman said this week that lightning strikes could trigger up to 150 fire starts in a single day.

Parched conditions have triggered a ban on all fires except small campfires in the Northwest Fire Centre, and the Coastal Fire Centre was set to implement a ban on all fires on Thursday.