ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: If you were told to leave everything behind, would you?

Aug 7, 2021 | 6:30 AM

IF A MASSIVE WILDFIRE was roaring towards your home, and you were told to evacuate, would you? A surprising number wouldn’t.

As crews fought — unsuccessfully, in large part — to save Monte Lake from the massive 45,000-hectare White Rock Lake fire during the past two days, evacuation alerts turned into evacuation orders. And some people stayed home.

That’s a problem. The police, wildfire personnel and local fire department volunteers tasked with convincing reluctant residents to leave are not only taken away from other work, but are put in danger themselves as wildfire closes in.

Since Thursday night, authorities have practically been begging property owners to pack up and get out when they’re told.

Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth got quite testy about it Friday. “These brave firefighters very nearly paid with their lives,” he said of the Monte Lake situation. “By any measure, this is completely unacceptable.”

The residents aren’t stupid. Staying home to try to protect your property is an understandable, though dangerous, response. In rural areas, people have pets and cows and horses to worry about. They have homes they may have put sweat and tears into for decades. They have prized possessions they don’t want to leave to the whims of wildfires and looters. They might not have insurance due to high premiums. The thought of leaving home, maybe for weeks, and not knowing what happened, puts more fear into them than the fire.

And, they think they can beat 150-ft. flames that burn at 1,200C and create smothering canopies of smoke that can kill as surely as the fire itself. Maybe some think they’ll get lucky and are willing to roll the dice. Sometimes, they do win, putting out flying embers with garden hoses, moving livestock, vehicles and equipment to less fire-prone parts of their land, and battling it out.

What they don’t understand is how quickly fire can be upon them, especially if winds change, consuming them and their possessions and property. It’s a life or death game.

People have died in that game, though there are no reports that it’s happened in B.C. so far this fire season (not including the tragic deaths of two Lytton residents when the fire swept through the town). But in Monte Lake, Ashcroft, Cache Creek, the Okanagan and the Cariboo, there’s increased evacuation hesitancy this year. It’s typical, apparently, for about 10 per cent of property owners to reject evacuation orders. Another 25 per cent wait to see what will happen — they figure if things start looking too dicey, they can escape, not realizing their escape routes may be cut off in a heartbeat as fire advances.

Those who have stayed and survived, whether or not they were able to save their homes, tell stories of absolute terror as the fire arrived. It’s hard to imagine the stress of those who evacuate, harder still to imagine the lasting trauma of staying and fighting.

And yet, questions are being asked about whether mass evacuations are the best strategy. Australia debates its “stay and defend or leave early” policy, which is based largely on how carefully property owners have prepared for fire — reducing fuel around the home, using fire-safe materials in the house, and knowing how to put out small fires that will precede arrival of the main fire or remain after it passes by.

“The policy is in recognition that the most dangerous option is to evacuate through the fire front and that most houses are lost due to ember attack which can greatly be controlled by able-bodied people in the building,” says a 2007 report on the risks of that approach.

I can’t help but think it’s not a policy that will take hold here any time soon.

Refusal to evacuate is part of every wildfire season in B.C. It can get emotional. During the 2017 season, Chief Joe Alphonse of Anaham First Nation got into a confrontation with RCMP when he told them 300 residents would not obey an evacuation order.

There were threats of roadblocks. Alphonse famously said, “They told me our roadblock won’t hold them back, but I said, ‘it may not hold you back, but once you start dodging bullets, you’ll start turning around’.”

It all ended peacefully, things were patched up and Alphonse was appointed to the Order of B.C. earlier this week.

So, the pleas to be packed and ready to leave if told continue. Four years ago, during the Williams Lake wildfire, police told unwilling evacuees dental records might be needed to identify them. It wasn’t necessary then; let’s hope it stays that way.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and a retired newspaper editor. He is a regular contributor to CFJC, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

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