One of the businesses forced to evacuate due to the Ross Moore Lake wildfire, south of Kamloops, was a pet daycare and boarding service.
TLC for Pets owner Tammy Osborne says they notified all the pet owners on Friday about the evacuation alert, asking them to get ahold of someone to, potentially, look after their pets if they have to evacuate.
“Emails were coming in, saying ‘Oh, I have someone looking out, we have been watching and already have a backup.’ So it was really nice to get all those emails on Friday.”
On Saturday, Osborne says they decided to take the next steps and evacuate; it was a day before the order was issued for their area by the TNRD.
“The order for people to be evacuated on Saturday was four kilometers up the road, and I thought we should evacuate ourselves because three minutes up the road is not that far.”
While most pet owners were out of town when that decision was made, she says everyone was quick to have friends or family lined up.
“I posted it to Facebook when my husband was driving the horses across the street on the other side, in Knutsford. By the time he came back — it wasn’t even 10 minutes — we had 50 people in our driveway,” she explained. “He could not even get into our driveway with our truck and trailer, so many people showed up.”
Osborne says in less than two hours, all the pets signed into boarding, were picked up.
“I couldn’t believe it because I was prepared to remove them all by myself. I had an evacuation plan, and I wasn’t planning for people to show up,” she said.
BC’s Emergency Preparedness Minister, Bowinn Ma, says the Ross Moore Lake fire is responsible for the evacuation of 450 people.