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The owner of a resort near Boston Bar, B.C., says part of his business has burned to the ground as two wildfires continue to grow in the area.
Shayne Findlay, the owner of Blue Lake Resort in B.C.’s Fraser Canyon, says he knew he had lost some buildings from watching a webcam — but he only realized the extent of the loss when he got to the scene.
“It looks alien. The hills are burned. There’s trailers burned. There’s wreckage everywhere,” Findlay told CBC’s Daybreak Kamloops.
The fires burning in the area, known as the Brunswick complex, together covered nearly 200 square kilometres, or 20,000 hectares, as of Wednesday night. They’ve forced numerous evacuation orders and alerts and closed part of Highway 1.
Findlay said a cabin built by his father has been lost, as well as a cabin Findlay built next to it when he was younger. Staff housing is also destroyed, along with storage buildings and multiple trailers, according to Findlay.
“We’re not the only ones who’ve lost,” he said. “There’s a lot of hurt going on right now.”
He said he has decided to shut down the resort for the summer to focus on cleaning up.
“It’ll take a team of arborists working for a week just to get the trees down to a point where it’s safe enough, where you can say, ‘OK, now we can start cleaning up.'”
Findlay said the wind has been the story of these fires.
“Watching on that webcam, I thought, I’ll lose everything. The embers were going up and down and sideways and I watched buildings flaring so hot that it was, you know, melting.”
The Brunswick complex includes the Brunswick Creek wildfire burning west of Highway 1 and the Ainslie Creek wildfire burning east of the highway. The B.C. Wildfire Service declared a third very small wildfire that was burning near the two out on Thursday morning.
All three are suspected to have been human-caused, a designation given to any fire not ignited by lightning.
B.C.’s Forests Minister Ravi Parmar told Daybreak Kamloops Thursday morning that the wildfires near Boston Bar are in challenging terrain, but he stressed that crews in the field are doing great work.
“Our wildland firefighters are absolutely exceptional in the response that they’re providing to help protect people, help protect communities and to be able to help address this fire,” he said.
He noted it has been difficult for crews to get aerial equipment into the sky with strong wind gusts.
He encouraged residents to download the B.C. Wildfire Service app to get up-to-date information on wildfires.
