By Jill Sperling

Overlanders Day celebrations cancelled due to wildfire smoke

Aug 19, 2018 | 8:27 AM

KAMLOOPS — After watching the sky closely, and with heavy hearts, organizers of Overlanders Day have decided to cancel today’s event. 

The Kamloops North Shore Business Improvement Association’s Executive Director Jeremy Heighton says it’s simply not healthy to be outside today. 

“In the last 24 hours we’ve been watching the Air Quality Index quite closely to determine whether or not we could proceed,” Heighton said. “This morning at about 5 a.m. we were watching the numbers, they don’t seem to be going down significantly, so we made the very difficult decision to cancel the event for today, and we’ll be meeting with the board in the next 48 hours to determine how to proceed.” 

Heighton says after six months of planning for the event, the decision to cancel was not made lightly. 

“Hundreds of hours, dozens of volunteers; it’s a significant undertaking. We see typically 10,000 people at Overlanders Day events year over year. It’s a significant disappointment to us.” 

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Heighton says it’s too difficult to tell at this point if it would be possible to simply postpone Overlanders Day to a later date. 

He says one thing that is sure is that Overlanders Day will be moved to July next year in hopes of avoiding the worst of the fire season smoke.