B.C. is mobilizing more wildfire fighting resources as activity heats up across the province, including in the area of Spences Bridge where dozens of residents were told to leave their homes immediately late Wednesday night (July 17).
Conditions became threatening there after two blazes, the Shetland Creek and Teit Creek wildfires, merged together sometime Wednesday afternoon and, feeding off of each other, ballooned in size to 4,125 hectares.
By 9:20 p.m., both the Thompson-Nicola Regional District and Cook's Ferry Indian Band had issued a series of alerts and orders for the area just south of Ashcroft.
Under the regional district, the residents of 76 homes in Electoral Area "I" were told to leave immediately. A further 25 homes in the same electoral area are under evacuation alert.
The Cook's Ferry Indian Band has issued an evacuation order for Reserves 5, 6, 8A, 19 Firstly and 22. Reserves 5A, 8, 9, 11, 11A, 18 and 20 are further under an evacuation alert. The band hasn't specified how many homes the orders cover.
鈥淭his wildfire has proven to be extremely volatile," Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness Bowinn Ma said Thursday (July 18) while providing an update on the situation.
No structures have been impacted so far in the area, as far as the B.C. Wildfire Service knows, but it said they are threatened.
Forest fuels in the area and across B.C. are at an especially high risk of ignition right now as hot, dry conditions persist.
As of Thursday morning, 25 regions remain under a heat alert, stretching from Whistler in the southwest to the north and central coasts and deep into the Interior. Environment Canada says the above normal temperatures will persist into the weekend for coastal regions and into next week for the Interior.
Cliff Chapman, director, provincial operations of the B.C. Wildfire Service, said forecasts call for seven days of above-average temperatures across the southern two-thirds of B.C. with highs hitting the mid-30s and approaching the low 40s. These higher temperatures will also come with strong winds, he added.
"I will be real clear," he said. "We are on the precipice on a very challenging 72 hours. We saw lightning came through yesterday. That's now being replaced with 30-plus-degree-weather over the course of the next 24 hours and we anticipate more significant lightning in the northern half of the province today as well as the potential of lightning across British Columbia tomorrow with localized convective activity."
One measure of the growing concern among officials is the pending arrival of wildfire incident management teams from Australia and New Zealand, which are expected to arrive on Friday.
Chapman added that Yukon and Alaska are also sending one air tanker each. And, a 20-person crew from Nova Scotia came in last weekend to help fight fires, while two firefighting aircraft from Ontario have landed and will be stationed in Williams Lake.
Chapman noted that they are also engaging much more closely this year with communities and their local firefighting resources.
"So essentially we have stood up our preparedness across the province with multiple resources in every zone in anticipation of lightning or non-lightning fires starting, so we can have aggressive initial attacks on those fires."
Chapman said the likelihood of B.C. calling in even more out-of-province resources is "moderate-to-high," but noted that resources across North America (and the world at large) are limited.
"So we need to be proactive in what we are looking for, make sure that we have the resource arrive on time," he said. "We do have an ask in already for additional ground firefighting crews to support our own staff, the contracted crews and the community firefighters that we currently have engaged and there has been no answer to that request at this point from the (Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre)."
