'Just hell': Shuswap firefighter recounts losing his home to the Bush Creek East blaze

All that’s left of firefighter Darren Reynolds’ house is a sooty pile of debris.

His home was one of the at least 131 structures destroyed by the Bush Creek East wildfire that tore through B.C.’s North Shuswap region, leaving devastation in its wake.

“I’ve never seen anything like it—and I don’t think I want to again,” the firefighter with the Scotch Creek/Lee Creek Volunteer Fire Department said in a video posted to the Columbia-Shuswap Regional District’s YouTube channel.

“If you’ve seen my property, it was moving so fast, it just turned everything to dust basically.”

While Reynolds’ house was flattened, one of his chicken coops and several chickens survived, as well as a turkey named Frankenstein. “You made it! Right on!” he’s seen telling the bird.

On Friday, Aug. 18, the day the now-43,000-hectare megafire descended on Scotch Creek, Reynolds recalled returning to the fire hall with his team after taking down danger trees around the Scotch Creek bridge.

His son Nathan and Nathan’s girlfriend Savannah—both firefighters—came back to the fire hall with the terrible news. They had watched the house burn down.

Despite that, the crew went back out to extinguish spot fires as the wind died down. But a mere 30 seconds later, “all hell broke loose,” Reynolds recounted.

“It just kept coming across the highway, we couldn’t stop it,” he said. “We couldn’t breathe or nothing, trees were candling right beside us, our hall was on fire, we watched the trailer just get ripped apart, just explode.”

He remembers the crew falling back, the fire chasing them, chunks of on-fire debris flying at them. “It just overran us, we had not a chance,” Reynolds said. “This whole (highway) was just hell. You couldn’t see two inches ahead of you.”

The department’s fire hall also burned to the ground, but the losses haven’t stopped the dedicated team.

Reynolds rushed his family to safety, but he and Nathan returned to the community three days later and have been there ever since.

In a news release accompanying the video, Reynolds explains why he returned. 

“This is my neighbourhood. I don’t have another neighbourhood. And nobody should have to go through this. It’s pretty ugly,” he said.

He added other firefighters also lost their homes and are still working hard to protect their communities.

“I’m proud of the whole North Shore to tell you the truth.”

He said he wants people to cut firefighters some slack, as they’re doing everything they can and have to choose priorities.

“People don’t understand that. They think they should all come first. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way... If I didn’t think the way I do, I would have said ‘to hell with the bridge’ and I would have went and protected my house. Instead, I don’t know how many thousands of people we got out of here,” he said.

“Unless you walk in my boots through this, you shouldn’t really say anything negative.”