Evacuation alerts expanded in northern British Columbia

The board chair of the Bulkley Nechako region has had a long week and expects the next one will not be any better, as more evacuation orders and alerts are in effect for an area of north-central British Columbia nearly surrounded by forest fires.

“I’ve had better weeks,” Bill Miller chuckled softly over the phone from Burns Lake, B.C., a community 1,000 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

The 35-kilometre stretch of land under evacuation order is west of the community of Fort St. James, in a mostly rural area, while an expanded evacuation alert includes several properties near the district municipality’s western edge.

Miller said they have been lucky with the most recent evacuation area expansion, as no properties or families in the area have been forced out in a zone most made up of camping and recreational sites.

However, he said if the fires continue to burn eastward, it will begin to affect residents in Fort St. James, and they need to be prepared to leave immediately if the alert is upgraded to an order in the next three to five days.

“The alert has expanded significantly to cover the community of Fort St. James and some other First Nations communities as well,” said Miller.

The wildfire burning near Shovel Lake that prompted the evacuation orders has grown to roughly 300 square kilometres and is one of the largest wildfires in the province, though Fire Information Officer Marg Drysdale of the BC Wildfire Service said the 2017 fire season had fewer but larger blazes to deal with.

“We had fires last season which were well over 100,000 hectares (1,000 square kilometres),” said Drysdale from the scene of the fire, adding the fires currently burning are not the biggest in B.C. history.