Cooler conditions offer fractional relief to crews
Nearly 300 wildfires are burning across B.C., but showers and cooler temperatures have taken an edge off the most aggressive blazes and curbed a cascade of evacuation alerts.
The Regional District of Central Okanagan said it planned to contact property owners through Tuesday to inform them about the state of their homes along the northwest side of Okanagan Lake.
The roughly 650-square kilometre White Rock Lake fire swept through the communities of Killiney and Ewings Landing late Sunday or early Monday. The district estimates about 70 properties have been burned, in addition to those in Monte Lake and Westwold levelled by the same fire earlier.
Evacuation orders and alerts issued over the last two days are still posted for many cities, towns and districts in the southern Interior threatened by several other large wildfires, including blazes near West Kelowna, Merritt and Kamloops.
The Coquihalla Highway, also known as Highway 5, reopened Tuesday after a wildfire cut off the route between Hope and Merritt on Sunday.
However, Highway 1 remains closed because a mudslide that washed over that route about 30 kilometres north of Lytton.
Highway 3, the other major artery between the Lower Mainland and the Interior, remains open, but it's shrouded by thick smoke from a fire burning between Hope and Princeton.
Drive BC, the province's online travel information service, says a geotechnical survey of the Highway 1 slide is planned, but there's no word when the highway could reopen and no confirmation of what caused the slide.
The BC Wildfire Service says 43 firefighters and technicians arrived in the province from Yukon on Monday, raising the total number of out-of-province firefighters to 519, including crews from Australia and Mexico.
Statistics from BCWS show 8,262 properties around B.C. are on evacuation order, a leap of nearly 2,000 since Friday, while residents of almost 23,000 more home must be ready to leave on short notice. Over 8,000 sq. km of trees, bush and grassland have been charred since the start of the wildfire season, an increase of nearly 400 sq. km a day.