'I don't think any of us have had a chance to consider the sheer magnitude of what happened out there'
I, and thousands of my neighbors, have lived through the nightmare that was the summer of 2017 and know exactly the magnitude of the disaster.
Friday July 7th was a surreal experience for those of us in the Central Cariboo. (I won't talk here about the horrific losses in the South Cariboo and Chilcotin) After work around 5:00 pm I was at a service station in Williams Lake filling up my pickup and getting a couple of 20 pound propane bottles filled for the upcoming weekend. The first dry lightning strike was on the ridge of Fox Mountain overlooking the city. Within seconds a column of black smoke was reaching for the sky. Getting into the pickup to head home to McLeese Lake - 35 km North of WL - the radio announcer was talking about multiple lightning strikes in the area and how the hot & dry wind was really starting to spread the fires.
Heading home I drove by 2 more fires one near the WL airport and the other very close to the community of Wildwood. A little further North another fire was burning near the highway in the Hawkes Creek valley near where that creek dumps into the Fraser River. Looking across the river towards the Chilcotin Plateau 3 separate fires were burning West of the ridge at Buckskin, Castle Rock, and Twan Lake.
By the time I got home, about an hour after the initial strikes, the smoke from all the fires had reduced visibility considerably. 24 hours later visibility was down to a few hundred yards.
On July 8th we had 10 out of control wildfires burning within 25 km of our home. They were burning to the North, South, East, and West of us! This was just the start of the problems as region wide we had over 60 out of control wildfires burning up the landscape. My wife and I started getting prepared and loaded up both out pickups and hooked up the trailers just in case we had to get out although I don't know where we would have gone as there were fires burning across the Highways both North and South of us.
The wildfire service fought the fires for the next week with little containment. Then the wind really came up ............................
We spent 2 weeks living with family in Quesnel and after our return home stayed on evacuation alert for another month. We were fortunate as our only loss was a TV set that I think was the victim of a power spike. Our freezers and fridge stay powered up while we were gone so we lost no food. Not all our neighbors were as lucky and many homes and outbuilding were lost.
