Kelowna Mounties assisting with evacuation efforts as crews battle wildfire

KELOWNA – A wildfire on Knox Mountain in Kelowna, B.C., spurred the evacuation of more than 400 properties as emergency crews worked to snuff out the blaze near Okanagan Lake on Saturday.

Jodie Foster, a public information officer with the Central Okanagan Emergency Operations Centre, said two evacuation orders came down for the Magic Estates and Poplar Point areas of Kelowna covering a total of 448 properties due to a wildfire.

Cpl. Judith Bertrand with the Kelowna RCMP said the cause of the fire is unknown as the situation in Knox Mountain Park was still unfolding in the afternoon.

“The Magic Estates area is quite a dense residential area,” Bertrand said in an interview. “In addition to that, the park is visited by a lot of people that are celebrating Canada Day, visiting, hiking, so we need to make sure that these people are safe.”

Bertrand said police assisted fire crews with the evacuation to ensure public safety and that winds made the direction of the fire hard to predict.

Bertand said people had to be evacuated as fire suppression efforts were underway, cautioning those in the area to not to get too close as smoke billowed into the sky above Okanagan Lake.

She said Kelowna deals with the prospect of wildfires every summer and they’re “always in the back of our mind here in the Okanagan region.”

“However, we have to act fast, we have to work in a coordinated effort with our partner agencies to make sure that things unfold as safe and as quickly as possible,” she said.

This year’s wildfire season has been particularly devastating elsewhere in B.C., with more than 9,620 square kilometres burned since April 1, said Pedro Roldan-Delgado, a fire information officer with the Prince George Fire Centre.

Roldan-Delgado said the province has dealt with 214 wildfires since April, putting this year’s wildfire season on track to vastly exceed the area burned last year.

In the 2022 season, he said, there were 247 wildfires that burned just over 590 square kilometres.

He said the fire centre is currently dealing with 68 active wildfires, as lightning strikes and dry conditions spark new blazes.

The Ittsi Creek wildfire north of Fort Nelson has shut down part of Highway 77 near the B.C. boundary with the Northwest Territories, and Roldan-Delgado said crews are waiting to see “if that fire will impact the highway more and they will start actioning it if it does.”

Pedro-Delgado said the fire centre is managing the situation as best it can with its limited resources in a season that started months earlier than normal.

“We have seen quite quite a crazy spring season to have these kind of numbers,” he said. “In our world, things can change so drastically within a few hours that it could go from busy to quiet within like a day or two.”

He said people need to follow all fire bans because “the public can do their part with preventing and reporting wildfires.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 1, 2023.