As wildfire devastation drives 35,000 from their homes across British Columbia, The Energy Mix’s Gaye Taylor writes from Nelson, B.C., about carrying on as usual—while breaking down inside—engulfed in smoke from the McDougall Creek fire raging 346 kilometres to her west in Kelowna.
The idea for this story first struck me on the brightest of blue-sky days in my hometown of Nelson, on a Friday morning less than three days after the McDougall Creek fire began on August 15 near West Kelowna, a community of 35,000 people, located west of the larger Kelowna city.
Blue sky summer days are common in Nelson, a town of 11,000 perched on the shores of Kootenay Lake, all around which rise forested slopes, some still untouched by logging. They culminate in succeeding waves of high mountains, named for Norse gods, Scottish administrators, amphibians (see Frog Peak and Mt. Toad), and more than one optimistic miner.
What made that blue-sky Friday morning striking was that it arrived as a reprieve, a blessing after two days of dense smoke. Winds being what they were that week, the smoke from McDougall had snaked east, racing across mountain tops, tracking valley floors, and smothering communities like Nelson hundreds of kilometres away, within hours.
And that morning was doubly-blessed because the two days of preceding smoke—thick and acrid—had felt like the down-chop across the neck that locals had been anticipating for weeks.
After a dry spring and weeks without a drop of summer rain, my tinder-dry hometown and the forests that surround it were parched. If fire itself did not arrive, residents knew smoke surely would. And it did.
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