Wildfires force mass evacuations in western US and Canada

Wildfires raging across the western United States and Canada have left residents on high alert for evacuation orders, while thousands already displaced face an anxious wait to discover what remains of their homes.

In western Canada, more than 20,000 people were forced to abandon communities along British Columbia's Okanagan Lake over the weekend. A rapidly advancing wildfire has destroyed homes, with dozens requiring aerial rescue.

Anette Boulet was among residents who fled Summerland, a town of about 12,000 people. As she and her family left around 4.30am on Saturday, their home was shrouded in smoke.

“You couldn’t see barely. It was, it was just dark, and the ridge, the ridge of fire just coming towards you,” said Boulet, who evacuated to a center in Penticton.

“There’s no words to express it," she said. "The fear.”

Besides the evacuations in Summerland, the Bald Range fire, first reported Friday evening, has also led to the evacuation of about 8,000 people in and around nearby Peachland. British Columbia declared a state of emergency Saturday because of the wildfires.

Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency management and community resilience, said Sunday on social media that she’d approved a request for federal assistance from British Columbia to provide shelter and accommodations for those forced to flee.

In the U.S., residents in some areas north of Spokane, Washington, were being advised Sunday to leave their homes. Residents in the rural towns of Malden and Rosalia, located about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Spokane, saw their evacuation level downgraded Sunday after being urged to leave the previous day after two fires started nearby. The area, though, is on alert.

John Goyke, mayor of Rosalia and the water operator for Malden, said that he saw the trees on the rolling hills burning Sunday morning. He put Malden on a water restriction Saturday night so water could be saved for fire trucks, and Malden’s fire department began trucking water from Rosalia.

“The wind is fairly calm. The fire is not progressing,” Goyke said, “but we’re using social media and Facebook to keep in contact with everyone.”

In 2020, Malden was was mostly destroyed by a wildfire, losing its fire station, post office, city hall and library.

In Utah, two helicopter pilots were killed when their aircraft crashed while they were fighting a wildfire Friday morning in the Fishlake National Forest. Crews were finally able to get to the site Saturday to confirm the deaths.

Officials said Sunday that fire activity had prevented them from quickly reaching the area amid steep, rough terrain.

“When we first got there we could see two different plumes of smoke, one from the crash site, one from an active fire coming towards us,” Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis said.