Skip to Content
ON AIR NOW5:00 PM - 12:00 AMRadio NL 70s, 80s, 90s
listen live
Home

Local News Now

Update: Nearly two-dozen new fires reported in Kamloops area

Colton Davies
Sep 4, 2019 | 5:22 PM


Update: Nearly two-dozen new fires reported in Kamloops area

Updated 4:50 p.m. –

Last night’s storm is long gone but the number of new fires reported keeps growing in the Kamloops Fire Centre.

The BC Wildfire Service online map reports 16 new fires today, but Information Officer Taylor MacDonald says those may have actually started last night but weren’t spotted right away.

“With the better visibility during the day and maybe the heat as well, it’s allowed the smoke to become more visible to people,” she said. “So that’s definitely helped versus last night it was kind of dark and stormy so it might have been difficult to spot these fires.”

“As well, it depends when the smoke might have popped up. It might not have initially been there, so it might have been later on that the smoke kind of became visible.”

A number of fires are between Merritt and Princeton, and most are considered to be spot fires. MacDonald says the exception is the Ollala fire near Keremeos, which is now about six-hectares in size.

She says there are a number of ground and aerial crews responding to the many fires in the area.

 

Original – 

The BC Wildfire Service has crews responding today to nine fires started by lightning in the Kamloops Fire Centre.

Information officer Kyla Fraser says all of those are spot fires besides a two-hectare blaze near Keremeos.

“Storm cells passed through the Fire Centre last night, igniting fires in all different areas. We’ve had about nine new fires since last night, and those are all at this time expected to be lightning-caused. So those are mostly all spot sized, none are threatening any communities,” Fraser says.

“I guess the one exception to the spot size would be the Olalla Creek wildfire, which is currently estimated at two hectares in size, and that one is located about 10 kilometres northwest of Keremeos. But again, not threatening any communities. We do have personnel responding to all of these fires today, and aerial resources are available if necessary.”

Outside of the Kamloops Fire Centre, there were also six other fires within the Coastal Fire Centre, near Pemberton and Whistler, believed to be started by the same storm.

Fraser says there were potentially other fires started by the storm that were put out by municipal fire departments where provincial help was not needed – including a lightning-caused fire near Batchelor Heights here in Kamloops.

Meanwhile, there were about 25,000 customers without power last night in the Kamloops area because of the storm, according to BC Hydro.

Spokesperson Jen Walker-Larsen says that included 18,000 customers in Kamloops, 2,000 in Salmon Arm and 3,200 in Vernon.

She says this was the largest outage from a storm in the area in more than two years.

“I think we had a pretty good storm in 2017 too, I think it was around May, where we had a lot of people across Kamloops, Salmon Arm, Revelstoke, all the way down to Nakusp and into the east Kootenays. So that was a broader storm, but at that time I think we had over 50,000 people out of power at the peak. But that was more a windstorm where this is an electrical storm.”

Walker-Larsen says as of noon today, only about 50 BC Hydro customers were still in the dark, and power for those people is expected to be back on this afternoon.