{"id":220062,"date":"2026-08-10T06:22:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:22:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/canadian-government-steps-in-as-out-of-control-wildfires-force-thousands-to-flee-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T06:22:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T06:22:14","slug":"canadian-government-steps-in-as-out-of-control-wildfires-force-thousands-to-flee-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/canadian-government-steps-in-as-out-of-control-wildfires-force-thousands-to-flee-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian government steps in as \u2018out of control\u2019 wildfires force thousands to flee – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

British Columbia battling 102 fires day and night across province, as breakneck speed hampers firefighters\u2019 efforts
Canada\u2019s federal government has announced it will provide urgent assistance to British Columbia after an onslaught of unprecedented fast-moving wildfires that killed one person and forced about 22,000 people to flee their homes in frantic evacuations.
A total of 102 wildfires were raging across the province on Sunday, of which nearly half were categorised as \u201cout of control\u201d, according to the BC Wildfire Service. Of those fires, 78 ignited during the past week.
The entire community of Summerland, about 30 miles (48km) south-west of the city of Kelowna and home to about 12,000 people, was evacuated overnight on Saturday, along with a further 8,000 people around nearby Peachland. About 10,000 others have been told to prepare to evacuate at a moment\u2019s notice.
Anette Boulet was among residents who fled Summerland along Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. As she and her family left around 4.30am Saturday, their home was shrouded in smoke.
\u201cYou couldn\u2019t see barely. It was just dark, and the ridge, the ridge of fire just coming towards you,\u201d said Boulet, who evacuated to a centre in Penticton.
\u201cThere\u2019s no words to express it, the fear.\u201d
In a social media post on Sunday, Eleanor Olszewski, Canada\u2019s minister of emergency management and community resilience, said she had \u201capproved a request for federal assistance from British Columbia to provide shelter and accommodations for people who have been forced to leave their homes\u201d.
\u201cI have tasked federal officials, led by the government operations centre at Public Safety \u200cCanada, to work with the province to ensure support reaches those who need it most,\u201d she \u200bsaid.
Efforts to battle the Bald Range wildfire have been hampered by the breakneck speed of its spread.
The blaze was first detected late on Friday evening, and grew within hours to more than 40 sq miles (100 sq km) \u2013 nearly twice the size of the island of Manhattan \u2013 as it raced nearly nine miles toward Okanagan Lake.
The province\u2019s premier, David Eby, declared a state of emergency late on Saturday, telling reporters that the blaze had been \u201clike a bomb going off.\u201d
Cliff Chapman, BC Wildfire Service\u2019s director of provincial operations, said the prolonged hot and dry weather the province has faced this summer had resulted in \u201cexplosive\u201d fire conditions<\/a> never seen before. Lightning caused by thunderstorms forecast this week could make the situation still worse, he said.
Residents were shaken awake in the middle of the night to flee their homes. Jennifer Pascoa, who lives in Summerland, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that she had begun to pack when she saw flames licking the nearby mountains.
\u201cIt happened so quickly. We came home from the beach, we saw the plume of smoke, and then within an hour, the sky was covered in dark, black clouds,\u201d she said.
The British Columbia Wildfire Service said 10 standard helicopters and one night-vision helicopter were involved in the response.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country\u2019s federal police force, said an 80-year-old woman died while trying to escape the wildfire that forced evacuations in the Okanagan Lake region.
Mike Flannigan, a professor of wildland fire at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, said the rapidity of the fires\u2019 spread was indicative of increasingly extreme blazes springing up in Canada and the US.
Southern BC and the pacific north-west in the US had had little to no rain in the past six weeks, leaving the regions \u201cbone dry\u201d, he said. \u201cYou walk through the forest, it crunches; if you look sideways, you start a fire.\u201d
These conditions were being driven by human-caused climate change, he said. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing higher intensity fires today than the past \u2026 the shorter the timeframe, the more challenging it is.\u201d
Before this decade, fire agencies\u2019 policy was that if a blaze was 20km (12 miles) away from a community, there was no cause for immediate concern. The ferocity and speed of these fires meant that such calculations no longer held, said Flannigan, warning that all homes in at-risk regions should have an emergency kit ready to go.
\u201cIf a fire can run 60km in a day, you should be worried about it,\u201d he said.
The Bald Range fire was also an example of how fires could metastasise through the night, he said.
Traditional firefighting practices would usually give firefighters a break during nightfall, as the cooler air would slow the burning. \u201cThat\u2019s not the case any more. The fire roars through the evening, through the night, and we\u2019re seeing this more and more,\u201d he said.
Drought and the sheer power and size of the fires during the day allow them to keep momentum even in the dark. Fire management agencies in BC and Alberta now fight fires after dark using night-vision helicopters.
Current conditions indicated that the fire season in BC and the US states of Washington and Oregon could extend into the autumn, Flannigan said.
\u201cIt looks grim \u2026 there\u2019s no rain,\u201d he said, adding that, like California, Canada may begin to have \u201cfire years\u201d instead of a summer fire season.
\u201cI\u2019m scared for the coming weeks.\u201d
In the US, crews in Washington that for over a week have been fighting three wildfires that began burning in the Spokane area continued clean-up near containment lines. None of the fires were growing, officials said. The fires have damaged or destroyed about 920 structures.
Earlier in the week a man was arrested and charged with intentionally setting the biggest of the three Spokane-area blazes.<\/p>\n

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British Columbia battling 102 fires day and night across province, as breakneck speed hampers firefighters\u2019 effortsCanada\u2019s federal government has announced it will provide urgent assistance to British Columbia after an onslaught of unprecedented fast-moving wildfires that killed one person and forced about 22,000 people to flee their homes in frantic evacuations.A total of 102 wildfires […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":220063,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220062"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220062\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}