Evacuation routes unsafe, West Kelowna council told
Spokesman for group of Glenrosa residents says forest service roads too narrow, rough for use as wildfire escape routes
Glenrosa residents fleeing a forest fire could be at risk if they use the two designated evacuation routes, West Kelowna city council has heard.
The 40- and 50-kilometre routes present a challenging drive along narrow and poorly maintained forest service roads, says a representative of the Glenrosa Residents Association.
“We’re very concerned about the safety of that thing,” Robert Mellalieu told council on Tuesday. “It’s too rough and dusty for 3,000 panicked Glenrosians to try to (use) if there’s a forest fire.”
Two evacuation routes have been designated for Glenrosa, both of which extend off the northern end of Glenrosa Road near the site of the long-closed Crystal Mountain ski hill.
A 40-km route heads west to the Okanagan Connector, rounding the base of Gottfriedsen Mountain, where there was recently a large forest fire. The 50-km route loops around West Kelowna to the north, connecting with Westside Road north of Bear Creek Provincial Park.
The rough roads are narrow, with no pullouts, and outside any cellphone coverage zone, Mellalieu said, adding wryly: “And if you’re running from a forest fire, a forest may not be the best place to go.”
The residents association, he said, would like to see a bridge built across Powers Creek to connect Glenrosa with the Smith Creek neighbourhood, offering a faster and safer way out of the community if it were threatened by fire.
But Mellalieu acknowledged that would be a long-term, high-cost undertaking for the municipality. In the interim, he said, there should at least be improvements to the designated evacuation routes, as well as fire-mitigation work to remove trees from the edges of the roads.
West Kelowna councillors were sympathetic to Mellalieu’s concerns, saying the city had tried since a major 2009 wildfire menaced the community to get the provincial government to upgrade the forest service roads for evacuation purposes.
“We’ll do our very best to try and make that secondary access available and improve it,” said Coun. Carol Zanon, “but of course it’s outside our city limit.”
Many years ago, Mayor Doug Findlater said, Bear Creek Main forest service road was in better shape than it is now. That’s because it was an active route for logging operations, he said.
“It would help if there were trucks on it now,” Findlater said, as that traffic would require a higher standard of maintenance than currently exists.
Nevertheless, Findlater promised to raise the issue with Transportation Minister Claire Trevina at next month’s Union of B.C. Municipalities convention in Whistler.