Image credit: The Canadian Press

By Mike Vanden Bosch-Fraser Valley Today

VILLAGE OF LYTTON

Rally to be held today in Lytton to protest lack of building activity since 2021 fire

Oct 18, 2023 | 7:40 AM

LYTTON, B.C. — As a retired school principal, Lytton mayor Denise O’Connor is accustomed to solving problems.

But getting the village she represents back up and running after a fire ravaged her community over two years ago is proving to be a formidable task, leaving her and others in this small town with a growing sense of frustration.

That’s why she and others in this small Fraser Canyon community north of Boston Bar are holding a rally Wednesday (Oct. 18) at noon to protest the lack of building since a fire gutted most of the town in 2021.

“It will be 840 days since the fire and they don’t want to wait any more, or be told to be patient or assume there are priorities more important than their homes,” O’Connor said in an email to Fraser Valley Today.

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While other parts of the province have already started rebuilding following this summer’s fires, O’Connor questions why Lytton isn’t allowed to do the same.

“They question why other places in the province have started cleaning up already after this summers fires,” O’Connor said. “They are afraid others will be rebuilt before Lytton.”

After being sworn in as mayor in the fall of 2022, O’Connor says she had reason to believe things would start to improve. However, that has not come to fruition.

“Since being sworn in as mayor almost a year ago, I believe we have moved some things along faster, but there is so much that is out of our control, or decided upon previous to us getting elected,” O’Connor said in her email. “We are making progress, but we are moving two steps forward, one step back.”

BC United MLA Todd Stone, representing Kamloops-North Thompson, posted on X/Twitter Tuesday afternoon about the ongoing issue with Lytton.

On X/Twitter, O’Connor vented her frustration over her impression that Lytton has been forgotten.

“We’ve been waiting for over two years,” she said online. “We need our voices heard. Lytton residents want their town back. We want to go home.”

O’Connor touched on the sensitive issue of archaeology and how she believes it has overtaken the larger issue of residents being allowed to come home.

“We’re concerned about archaeology,” she wrote on X/Twitter. “We know archaeology is important, but some residents feel their ancestors would want them home by now. We don’t understand our MDLs (management direction letters) or why they are so confidential. We feel like Lytton has become an archaeology project, not a rebuild project. There have been archaeology monitors for the debris cleanup, for the foundation removals, for the soil removal and for the backfilling. Now we’re hearing we may need monitors when we rebuild and it could cost us thousands of dollars more.”

The Canadian Press reported that the Insurance Bureau of Canada estimated insured losses of the destruction in Lytton at $102 million.

The 2021 fire destroyed 90 per cent of the town’s buildings and scorched an additional 837 square kilometres of land, according to the Canadian Press.