Kelowna says 'thanks' for help

By Dan Hilborn, Burnaby Now assistant editor
Published Sept. 10 2003

Almost everyone in British Columbia has family or friends who are affected by the wild fires burning throughout the province's Interior - and the staff at the Burnaby NOW are no different.

Former Burnaby NOW editor Barry Gerding is today the editor of the Kelowna Capital News, in the Okanagan city hit hardest by the raging forest fires.

While Gerding has been able to go home each night that the fires have been blazing, that's not been the case for the rest of the newspaper's staff.

"We've had three people on staff lose their homes," said the usually mild-mannered editor. "We've also seen several other people have their homes evacuated. When the fire took off, two of the people in the editorial department had their homes hanging by a thread.

"The whole community is affected by this."

Gerding, who was contacted last Friday morning just as the stubborn Okanagan Mountain Park fire was threatening the city of almost 100,000 residents for a second time, said his neighbours and co-workers are coping, but the fires are even more devastating than they could possibly appears on television.

"We're kind of immersed in it," he said. "You see smoke every day. You see it when you get up or when you're going home. It's all over town and blowing through the sky. It's a very dramatic thing to watch.

"It's even kind of like entertainment - especially at night when the flames shoot 100 feet high. But it's also causing a lot of hardship," Gerding said. "People are moving in and out of homes. Some people have been asked to move for a second or third time - they've been evacuated."

Gerding said his neighbours are grateful for the assistance they've received from throughout the province - most notably from the 50 different fire departments who answered the call to help.

Among the many firefighters who travelled to the Okanagan when the second call for help was sent out last Thursday was Burnaby deputy chief Bob Cook, who led a crew of eight firefighters and two vehicles on the most recent trip.

While the Burnaby crew did not have to battle any flames during their three-day visit to the Okanagan, they were kept busy hosing down homes in neighbourhoods threatened by the moving fire.

"We were in the subdivisions, working on the houses that are up against the tree line," Cook said Tuesday morning. "We were working with the forestry department rigging up rooftop sprinklers and soaking down the roofs of the houses."

By Sunday, the winds shifted again and the fire turned away from town, allowing the visiting firefighters to pack their bags and return home.

The crew that made the trip included Cook, Captains Les Strange and Rick Terry, firefighters Eric Vogel, Doug Dean, Trent Collison, Darcy O'Riordan, Gus Miller and Mark Forsberg, plus mechanic Karl Lackner.

Gerding said the city of Kelowna is now working on a plan to reduce its vulnerability in the future.

"The term we hear now is 'interfacing with the forest' - that's the new buzzword up here," he said. "One person has suggested that we plow a fire guard around every Interior town, but in reality, if a fire is running, the embers can fly up to a kilometre, so how wide a fire guard do you carve out to stop that?"