A firefighting aircraft flies low over the city of Williams Lake in the B.C. Interior on July 21, as it battles the River Valley fire that reached the outskirts of the community.Spencer Stratton/The Canadian Press
Stewart Cawood normally starts his summer days in B.C.’s former gold-mining boomtown of Barkerville at the blacksmith’s forge, where he lights kindling and stokes the West Virginian coal that burns upward of 1,600 C.
While Mr. Cawood, a spokesperson for the national historic site, would usually be chatting up hundreds of tourists while demonstrating age-old techniques, he instead spent Monday morning searching out an update on how the sprinklers atop the ghost town’s 140-odd buildings protected it overnight from the rapidly growing Antler Creek wildfire.
A day earlier, he and his family were forced out of their home in the neighbouring District of Wells, joining thousands of people on evacuation orders in British Columbia and Alberta after Western Canada’s wildfire season intensified over the weekend.
In its heyday, Barkerville was home to roughly 4,000 people before the Cariboo gold rush wound down. The town burned to the ground in 1868 and was rebuilt within a year.
The Barkerville Heritage Trust charity employs up to 75 people, including Mr. Cawood, to create a “living-history museum” each summer that welcomes more than 35,000 tourists. But fires have become a recurring threat.
“This is very fragile, and it has been lost before,” Mr. Cawood said.
At Williams Lake, a two-and-a-half-hour drive south, residents had a front-row look at the wildfire fight to save their city Sunday, as water bombers swooped low and dropped red fire retardant. Crews sprayed structure fires from ladders and RCMP evacuated homes.
The River Valley fire, which the BC Wildfire Service said had grown to 40 hectares in size by Monday, is one of more than 330 blazes burning in the province, with clusters along the boundary with Alberta as well as in the Central Interior.
B.C.’s Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness said residents of about 440 properties across the province have been told to evacuate. A further 3,000 are under evacuation alert, meaning that, on short notice, they could soon be asked to do the same during a “dynamic and everchanging” situation.
Across the Rockies, Alberta officials said Monday afternoon that roughly one-third of its 161 active wildfires were burning out-of-control and that about 7,500 people had been forced out of their homes, mostly in the north. One of the largest blazes is more than 105,000 hectares in size and is expected to continue growing northeast of Fort McMurray.
Christie Tucker, information officer with Alberta Wildfire, said it’s “fairly unusual” for the province to experience fire danger this intense so late in the season. But lightning and extreme heat, which has stripped moisture from forest floors and crisped fuel for fires, have ignited and worsened blazes across Alberta.
Ms. Tucker said heavy smoke helped firefighting efforts over the weekend by keeping wildfire behaviour subdued. But she said a low-pressure system coming from B.C. could make the situation worse.
“We are expecting that we are going to see some increased activity for sure and the fires are going to be moving in a different direction, or several different directions, so that can always be challenging for firefighters,” she said.
While precipitation and lower temperatures could help stifle some of the blazes up north over the next few days, Ms. Tucker said the opposite is taking place in southern Alberta, where things are starting to “heat up.” Wildfires late into July and through to September are more often down south, she added.
Fires that are threatening communities are prioritized, but she said there is a “competition for resources” because blazes burn in all corners of Alberta and in neighbouring provinces. About 1,900 fire personnel in Alberta are working currently to bring the situation under control, in addition to firefighters from other provinces and abroad, including a group of 55 from Australia.
BC Wildfire Service spokesperson Emelie Peacock said B.C. is also leaning on Australian and New Zealand staff to help its agency’s nearly thousand firefighters battle fires across the province. She said 100 other firefighters are coming into the province from Ontario to join 36 staff from Yukon, as well as two aircraft from both those jurisdictions and one air tanker from Alaska.
The number of B.C. “wildfires of note,” which pose a risk to people or property or are highly visible, increased from one to four, as fire activity spiked over the weekend.
Spencer Stratton, one of Williams Lake’s roughly 10,000 residents, said “well over 100 people” had gathered about a block away from Sunday’s fire front to watch crews fight the flames.
“Everybody was panicked – understandable because the fire was less than a road across from us,” he said.
“It was one set of buildings away from us – that’s how close the fire was.”
With a report from The Canadian Press