[溫哥華本地新聞] Peachland wildfire: More than 1,000 people can return home tonight wildfire, already, tonight, collect, several

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Peachland wildfire: More than 1,000 people can return home tonight

Four homes and several outbuildings were damaged or destroyed in the fire.



Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Vancouver/831135/story.html#ixzz26Att6PUM
PEACHLAND — “It was just chaos.”
Brian Brady said the frantic rush to collect his family and exit their home under a haze of smoke and ash is already a blur.
The Peachland resident and father of two vacated the area along with more than 1,500 others ahead of an encroaching wildfire in the central Okanagan on Sunday afternoon.
“In 10 minutes I brought tooth brushes and a sweater. And the piggy bank,” he joked, wincing.
“Oh, and the baby pictures,” his wife Christine Durocher said as she stood in front of the Lions Club Community Centre on Monday.
Like hundreds of other families, Brady and Durocher sought shelter first at friends’ homes and then at the centre in West Kelowna, which registered evacuees on arrival to account for any missing persons.
Outside Peachland, the curtain of smoke and smell of stale charcoal had all but vanished under a cloud-dotted blue sky Monday, but the human fallout remained.
Tilman Hainle lost his boyhood home in the vicious wildfire that swept down a mountainside near this lakeside Okanagan community Sunday, but Canada lost a piece of history.
The house where Hainle grew up sat abandoned on a former vineyard Hainle had worked for 40 years, the result of a decision to sell the property to a developer last May.
It was also the property where Canada’s first commercially released icewine was created in 1978. Hainle was a teenager when he and his father collaborated on the first of what would become a signature Canadian product.
“It’s a time for mixed emotions,” Hainle said in a sober interview Monday, hours after officials confirmed the house and three other homes were destroyed by the blaze.
“It certainly has a lot of significance, not just in terms of our history but it’s a significant piece of Canadian wine history as well.”
Hainle, 53, said his parents purchased the property in the early 1970s and became among the first in the area to plant European grapes. The creation of the icewine was a product of a father-son experiment.
“We didn’t realize at the time it was so significant,” he said.
See more Peachland wildfire photos here.
The fire, which started near Peachland and grew to three kilometres in a little more than an hour, continued to send thick clouds of white smoke over the community Monday, with RCMP officers blockading all entrances to the district along Highway 97.

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“The wind was blowing very hard in that area,” Peachland’s fire chief, Grant Topham, told a news conference Monday.

“We had the crews in there and they saved many, many homes. The wind blew the fire into those homes. They tried to save them as best they could; they tried their best. They saved many homes, but unfortunately, there were some they could not, did not save.”

Several outbuildings were also damaged or destroyed. More than 400 people remained under an evacuation order late Monday, though 1,110 evacuees had been cleared to return to their homes. Officials said favourable weather conditions and “excellent firefighting efforts” had the fire 75 per cent contained.

Catherine Williams, director of emergency support services for the Central Okanagan Regional District, said food and shelter were the priorities for remaining evacuees.

“Our mandate is to support people for 72 hours with lodging, food, clothing,” she said at the community centre, which was at capacity earlier Monday with several hundred evacuees. With hotels filling and wallets thinning, area residents turned out by the hundreds for assistance.

The services Williams and her volunteers provide falls under the Provincial Emergency Program, which offers a $150 necessities allowance, within 72 hours, at hotels, grocery stores and retailers, like Walmart.

“People say, well, they can use a credit card. Guess what, not everybody has credit cards. Or they can’t afford to go out and buy school clothes,” Williams said.

The most valuable thing? “I would say it’s a roof over their head,” said first-aid volunteer Michael Bullock, who worked at the centre Sunday evening and most of Monday.

And animals need shelter too, insisted Petra Leinemann, logistics chief at the Kelowna branch of the Canadian Disaster Animal Response Team.

She and a raft of volunteers, equipped with leashes, collars and pet food, took in evacuees' “dogs, cats, cockatoos and even snakes,” as the fire burned.

“Our staff are also looking to make sure the animals are healthy, happy,” she said. They provide shelter with kennelling, crates and “cuddling and love, of course.”

The wildfire started near a park on the northern edge of Peachland, a community of about 5,200 located 380 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, but it wasn’t clear what caused it. Wind gusts as strong as 50 kilometres an hour fuelled the fire, which quickly grew to two square kilometres.

On Monday, 65 firefighters were at work with the help of water tankers, 17 fire trucks and half a dozen water-bombing helicopters.

Fire chief Topham said crews had made progress, but there were still areas of concern.

“We have areas where there are hot spots, there are trees that are still burning, there are stumps that are still burning,” he said.

“We are expected to get up to possible 50-kilometre winds. We may or may not get rain.”

Elsie Lemke, director of emergency operations for the District of Peachland, said officials were working to contact the residents whose homes were destroyed, but she wasn’t sure how long that might take.

“Our hearts go out to the property owners who have suffered loss because of this fire,” she said.

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helicopter drops water on a wildfire in Peachland, B.C., on Monday September 10, 2012. One millimetre of rain and calmer winds overnight brought a small amount of relief to fire crews and about 1,500 residents who were quickly evacuated from their homes Sunday in the face of a raging wildfire in Peachland.


Six-year-old Peachland wildfire evacuee Azaneth Mejia waits outside an evacuation centre with family friend Carmon Gorzynski in West Kelowna, B.C., on Monday September 10, 2012. One millimetre of rain and calmer winds overnight brought a small amount of relief to fire crews and about 1,500 residents who were quickly evacuated from their homes Sunday in the face of a raging wildfire in Peachland.


A photo of the Peachland wildfire