Some residents won't leave B.C. community despite wildfire evacuation orders

It's been a calmer 24 hours on the wildfire front in B.C., but hundreds of properties remain under evacuation orders in the Central Kootenay region as anxious residents hope for the best.

From New Denver, where some evacuees from Silverton have been staying, video shows a wall of wildfire smoke choking the air and blocking any view of their village.

“The smoke has been pretty bad, actually, here for the last week… everybody here has a cough now because it’s just so thick,” said Tanya Gordon, the mayor of Silverton.

The Aylwin Creek fire, which the mayor said was a couple kilometres from Silverton at last report, has forced the evacuation of her community. But she said not everyone has left.

“There seems to be a little bit of hesitancy to leave,” the mayor said.

“I believe there’s a lot of people that feel there’s going to be no one protecting their property and I can assure them, we have so many fire departments from everywhere across B.C. here,” she explained.

“When we ask individuals to leave, it’s based on our safety concerns for them, our safety concerns for our firefighters and operational needs to have people out of the area sometimes so we can work effectively,” said Dan Seguin, RDCK emergency operations centre director.

The regional district is dealing with a number of wildfires, with about 555 properties under evacuation orders and more than 1,000 properties on evacuation alert, said Seguin.

“It’s devastating to see,” Gordon said.

“We live in such a beautiful area and I’m so scared to see what the aftermath is going to look like,” she added.

Meanwhile, near Golden, where up to six homes were lost this week, officials said that wildfire has not grown substantially.

There are currently more than 400 wildfires burning in B.C. and more than half of them are out of control, including the Shetland Creek wildfire near Spences Bridge.

Thompson-Nicola Regional District director Tricia Thorpe flew over the fire on Thursday.

“Looking from the air, you can kind of see the intensity and everything is just totally charred,” she said

But she also said that crews have been working hard to stop the fire.

“You can see just the miles and miles of guard that the B.C. Wildfire Service is working on,” she said.

The fire is more than 23,000 hectares in size and still out of control.