Chapter 6 An empty house in an empty town
Roger Hollander, the fire chief in 100 Mile House, got a call from his dispatcher at 11:20 in the morning on July 6 about a wildfire near a couple of mills at the north end of town. “My deputy, Brandon Bougie, and I responded right away,” Roger told me as we spoke in his office at the fire hall in the middle of 100 Mile. The community of two thousand people straddles Highway 97 and got its start during the Cariboo Gold Rush when a roadhouse was built a hundred miles north of Lillooet.
Roger and Brandon discovered that the fire, about two hectares in size, was in an undeveloped area many people used as an unofficial gun range. As there had been no lightning that morning, they suspected a human cause—perhaps target shooting. It wasn’t unusual for the 100 Mile Fire Department to respond to a wildfire in that location. But what happened afterward was unusual. Neither Roger nor the town of 100 Mile had seen anything like it before.
Roger called for assistance from the fire departments at 108 Mile and Lone Butte, as well as the BC Wildfire Service. The fire was on Crown land, slightly outside the 100 Mile House protection zone. It was about a kilometre away from the town’s sawmills—uncomfortably close, because their assets, lumber and logs, were highly flammable. If they caught fire, the town was in deep peril. Roger recognized that he would need BC Wildfire’s expertise and equipment to combat the blaze. By 1:00 p.m., its air tankers were on the scene, and more firefighters and a helicopter were coming. A BC Wildfire command team took over the management of the incident, now called the Gustafsen Lake fire.
“I was actually camping at the time,” Staff Sergeant Svend Nielsen said after I asked him where he was when the fire broke out. He was head of the RCMP detachment in 100 Mile and we were speaking in his office. He had set aside an hour and a half to talk to me, but he was ready to answer a call at any moment. A tall burly man, he was dressed for work in his bulky bulletproof vest.
Svend told me that his family had been staying at a campsite on Sheridan Lake for a few days to celebrate his father’s eightieth birthday. On the morning of July 6, the sky was blue and the lake lovely. But the temperature soared to 32°C, 9° hotter than normal for that time of year. And in the afternoon, when Svend looked to the northwest in the direction of 100 Mile House, he could see a huge plume of smoke. He sent a text message to his second in command, Sergeant Don McLean: “Nice little fire you got there.” Don texted him back, “So far so good. I’ll let you know if we need you.”
By the next morning, the fire had exploded to twelve hundred hectares. The fickle winds had changed several times since the fire erupted. Now they were blowing toward the north and, at 8:30 a.m., the Cariboo Regional District (CRD) had put 108 Mile and 105 Mile House on alert. The 100 Mile Fire Department was assisting 108 Mile House. Don McLean sent Svend an email, the subject line of which read, “I need you back right now.” There was no message, but the intent was clear. Svend bolted down his breakfast, left his family at the campground and drove back to the detachment. When he arrived, it was around 10:30. Don told Svend that because the fire was so aggressive, the CRD would be upgrading the alert to an evacuation order.
Val Severin was in charge of a team of volunteers with the South Cariboo Search and Rescue (SAR) who were going to help the RCMP notify the residents. While the police are responsible for ensuring that evacuation notices are delivered, SAR teams have specialized training in finding people during emergencies and often assist. Val, a striking woman with red hair and flashing blue eyes, was an eighteen-year veteran volunteer with SAR. I met her in the SAR Hall in 100 Mile House, where she told me that the South Cariboo SAR has forty members, making it one of the largest such groups in the province. (The list of places it helped to evacuate in the summer of 2017 reads like a map of the Cariboo: 108 Mile House, 105 Mile House, 103 Mile House, Lac La Hache, the city of 100 Mile House, the city of Williams Lake, 150 Mile House, 70 Mile House, South Green Lake, McLeese Lake, Wildwood, Anaheim, Alexis Creek, Canim Lake and Hawkins Lake.) As expected, the CRD issued its evacuation order. It came at 11.48 a.m., when Svend was arriving at the 108 Mile House community hall, the epicentre of operations. The parking lot was abuzz with activity. Firefighters from all over the province were coming in to help the two dozen or so volunteers from the 108 Mile Fire Department, who were already on the scene. Svend said, “They were asking me, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ I pointed them toward Marcel Reid, the local fire chief. Through the course of those first few hours it was unbelievable. You stand and watch the explosions that are happening when homes and properties are being lost. There was one point where I heard a pop, pop, pop and then I saw this whole black cloud. Around that time, the fire chief walked up to me and he said, ‘You have fifteen minutes. We’re going to lose the whole west and northwest side of the 108.’”
The RCMP and SAR volunteers scrambled. The community of seven hundred homes and twenty-five hundred people emptied out. The firefighters stayed behind, working doggedly, setting up sprinklers as the flames came ever closer. “I grew up in that area where the fire actually encroached into the 108,” Svend said. In some ways that was good, he explained. He was familiar with the terrain: “I knew every trail, every nook and cranny.” But it also meant that he took what happened personally. The fire almost burned the house of one of his close friends. When they were growing up, this pal was often at Svend’s place for breakfast and sleepovers, and the two went to school together starting in kindergarten and all the way through high school. “The fire came to the edge of his door,” Svend said, shaking his head. Two houses down from there, people lost a home. And he had another childhood friend whose family home was badly scorched by the fire. The siding completely melted. “I grew up on that street. It’s hard to grasp. But they stopped it. Marcel and his crew basically saved the 108.”
In the late afternoon, once 108 Mile was evacuated, the officers drove south back toward 100 Mile House. On the way, Corporal Brian Lamb radioed Svend: “I think there’s a bit of problem by the 103 area.” Svend recalled, “He was basically saying that the fire is right there, you could see it. I told him, ‘Well get in there then.’ We were literally dragging people out of their homes because they weren’t aware that the fire was actually there. It had grown so fast and developed so quickly in that one spot. We started doing a total tactical evacuation of the 103 because of necessity. We didn’t know where the fire was going to go. This is something we do on our own without any type of government authorization. We assume that there’s a risk involved with an area. And so we make the decision.” The CRD soon issued its own order—at 4:45 p.m.
That first night, Svend slept in his office on two mats from the gym; he used one coat for a pillow and another for a blanket. He lay down under his desk because the lights, which were left on all the time, were very bright. He wasn’t very comfortable, squeezing his big frame under his desk, but he was able to sleep about three or four hours. On Saturday, he got up around 6 a.m. and started the day with a couple of briefings. One dealt with regular business—the usual calls, which hadn’t stopped during the emergency. Svend called this “core” policing. The other handled evacuations, security—issues that arose from the fires.
Once the RCMP cleared an area, it had to ensure that no unauthorized people entered it and that any homeowners who stayed behind remained on their own property. Though the 100 Mile House detachment had six reported break-ins during the fires, most of them turned out to be legitimate in one way or another. For example, while on patrol, a couple of members stopped at one house because the front door and garage were both wide open. They investigated and found that a safe in the house was open too, but the money and valuables were still inside. A firearms safe was open as well, but in this case, the guns were gone. When one of the investigating officers told Svend about it, he asked, “What do you think happened?” The officer said, “I think they just left and forgot to close everything.” The police secured the house, and when the homeowners got back, they found a card from the Mounties that read, “Please call us.” They were amazed to hear what had happened. They were convinced they had locked up properly. Svend said, “They were frightened, they were fleeing.”
The fire was always moving, dancing ahead, blown by the winds and propagated by embers. By Saturday, the Gustafsen Lake fire had ballooned to thirty-two hundred hectares and was approaching Highway 97 near the 103 Mile House ridge. Peo-ple were still using the road, leaving the area, going south; some who had originally planned to stay in their homes had changed their minds. While this exodus was going on, the BC Wildfire Service was trying to contain the blaze. As Svend put it, “Brian [the corporal who had first noticed fire activity at the 103] was coming over the radio saying, ‘The helicopter crews are hovering over and dropping water, trying to stop it from crossing the highway.’ And then he added, ‘They’re dropping water right on the cars.’ Actually he didn’t say it that way. I can’t really repeat how he said it,” Svend remarked with a smile.
Svend had to block off that part of the highway. And because his fifteen members had so many tasks to cover now, they couldn’t take their usual time off. On the section of road near 103 Mile House, officers were stationed in pairs in their vehicles. This allowed one officer to sleep, yet still be available if his partner needed him. “It wasn’t a very relaxing place for a snooze,” Svend said. “The fire was two hundred metres away.”
While the fire was growing, the responsibilities of the RCMP were also growing. But like many RCMP members and other first responders, this was not all Svend had to consider. He had a family in the area—his wife and four kids. On Saturday, his wife came back from the campground on Sheridan Lake to pick up some things from their home. She was planning to drive away with the kids, so Svend went over to the house to meet her. When she got out of the truck she said to Svend, “I’m so happy to see you.” But when she tried to give him a hug, all he could think about was hastening his family’s departure. Without saying a word, he jumped in the truck his wife had been driving and parked the trailer because his wife was not comfortable doing that. She looked at him with astonishment. Svend told her, “I haven’t got time to chat. You’ve got to get out of here, so I don’t need to think about you and the kids.” She quickly grabbed some essentials, loaded up the truck, and the family left for Kamloops. The erratic and dangerous behaviour of the fires put everyone on edge.
By Sunday, July 9, the influx of evacuees had caused the population of 100 Mile House to swell to twenty-five hundred. In an interview in the council chambers, Mitch Campsall (who had been the mayor for nine years and a councillor for eleven years before that) told me he wasn’t convinced his town would be a safe haven much longer. He said he had encouraged evacuees to go on to Kamloops or Prince George, where reception centres had also been set up. Interior Health had already taken the precaution of moving hospital patients and elderly people living in residential care away from danger.
On the afternoon of July 9, a meeting was convened in the local arena. “I thought it would be a meeting with twelve other people,” Svend said. “I walk into the arena and I don’t know why I didn’t notice the bazillion cars in the parking lot. Well I’d been at it for two days solid you know, twenty-, twenty-one-hour days. I guess your brain shuts off.” In fact, about six hundred people were in the audience, eager to know more about the fires and what was likely to happen. When it was Svend’s turn, he spoke about how the RCMP was handling security. He started to take questions, and then all of a sudden he felt a tap, tap, tap on his shoulder. He looked behind him. It was Mitch, the mayor.
Svend didn’t know it but the die was close to being cast. Mitch pushed away the microphone that Svend was holding. Then he leaned in and whispered, “We might be evacuating.” He smiled at Svend and turned away. This meant that Svend needed to get back to the office and start planning for the eventuality. “But it’s not like you can just drop the mike and leave when you’re talking to six hundred people,” he said. He answered a few more questions, and then handed his microphone over to one of the other speakers. Svend recalled that as he got up to go, “This poor lady is standing there asking me about her dogs. And of course this is what we were into at that point—questions about anything and everything. So I said, ‘Well, walk with me.’” The two of them walked out together and while the lady was still talking to Svend about her dogs, Constable Peter Gall was bending his other ear about what they would have to do should the order be issued.
“You know the scene from one of those asteroid movies where the guy is sitting in a car and a big asteroid goes sweeping by and there’s a bunch of smoke?” Svend asked. His expression was half-fearful, half-astonished. “That was me. I mean there were two plumes and they were huge at this point. And I thought, The world is going to end. I said to the lady, ‘Sorry ma’am, I’m going to have to go.’ She’s like, ‘Okay, I can see why.’ Because of course we were in the meeting for two hours and in that time, the fires had started up again. We get in the car and Pete looks at me and he goes, ‘Should I drive Code 3?’ [This is where he would peel out of the parking lot with lights flashing and sirens screaming.] ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘You don’t want to panic everybody, just drive normal.’”
Mitch had spent all Sunday thinking about whether he would have to issue an evacuation order. At the big meeting in the arena the mayor told everyone that an announcement could happen at any time. “I wear my heart on my sleeve,” Mitch confided. “I got pretty emotional. I said, ‘Make sure you get your bag packed, make sure it’s in the car, not at the door because it is serious.’ I made the comment because I was starting to get scared.” When a reporter from the 100 Mile Free Press phoned him, a few hours later, around 7:00 in the evening, she said, “I understand you guys are evacuating us.” Nothing was official yet. “We have no intentions at this moment,” he replied.
But the fire was now five thousand hectares in size. The winds were unfavourable, and the direction the fire was taking seemed particularly disturbing. “The fire kept trying to get around our barriers to the sawmills,” Mitch told me. Forestry was one of the mainstays of the local economy and the yards had always been a welcome sign of business activity. But if the mills ignited, one scenario that local officials considered was that a fire cloud might erupt. Svend described it this way: “If the fire got over the hill and actually into the log yards it would create an ember cloud. The cloud, based on the size of the log piles, would be about five kilometres by five kilometres, so basically cover the whole town and rain fire on it—like a volcanic episode.”
The technical term for what Svend called an “ember cloud” is “pyrocumulus” or “flammagenitus.” Normally clouds are created when the sun heats the surface of the earth, which causes water to evaporate and rise. As the moist air hits the cooler upper atmosphere, it condenses and forms a cloud. This also happens with a pyrocumulus, but much more quickly. And because wildfires can reach temperatures of 800°C or more, the upward drafts are powerful, sometimes towering to heights of eight kilometres. A pyrocumulus generates strong and unpredictable winds that can pick up “firebrands”—burning pieces of wood—and propel them for one or two kilometres, spreading the holocaust even farther. To me the possibility sounded Biblical in its severity.
Another issue was escape routes. Highway 97 was blocked off north and south of 100 Mile due to other fires. Only one exit remained—Highway 24. When we left our cabin on July 9, I had not heard about ember clouds, but avoiding the possibility of being trapped was now a priority for me. Even Highway 24 was not totally secure. At the time, there were three fires near Little Fort, by the junction of Highway 24 and Highway 5. Though they were not blocking the road, it was easy to imagine that with a shift of wind, they could.
Roger Hollander was mindful of a talk he had heard just a month before at the BC Fire Chiefs Conference in Vernon. Chief Darby Allen, who had led the defence of Fort McMurray during the 2016 fire there, described the evacuation of his city—how people drove through flames to get out. Roger didn’t want that to happen again. When the BC Wildfire officials told him they were recommending evacuation, he thought it best to move on it right away. He didn’t want to wait until daylight and discover that new blazes were obstructing the last way out.
Town officials held one final briefing to discuss logistics. When they were ready to go, all they needed was the mayor’s signature. “He teared up when I slid him that piece of paper,” Roger said. “He really loves this town.”
“Bang, I grabbed the piece of paper,” Mitch told me. “Boy that was tough. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. You know, we’ve never had this community evacuated. This was all new to me. I really believed that when we came back, this town was not going to be the same. That scared me. And again, I’m being honest, I really believed we were going to lose a big portion of the town.” The order was issued at 8:47 p.m. Mitch called the 100 Mile Free Press: “Yes, we are evacuating now.”
“We couldn’t get the printer running fast enough,” he recalled. The police officers and SAR volunteers who were going to deliver the notices had to stand and wait for the sheets to come out of the machine. They’d grab a handful, hot off the press, and be gone. Five minutes later, some more people would show up, wait while the printer was cranking away, and grab another lot.
Throughout these operations, Svend’s biggest concern was that they would miss someone, that something would happen and the person would die. “That was the number one thing, my greatest fear during the whole summer.” He insisted that his men go to great lengths to be sure that all the residents knew what was happening. During the evacuation, a couple of his members came to one house that appeared to be empty. The neighbours, however, insisted that five minutes before the police arrived, they had seen someone inside. So the officers knocked several times and looked in the windows, but couldn’t rouse anyone. One of them finally phoned Svend and asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
Svend said, “Kick the door.”
“Kick the door?” the officer asked, in surprise.
“Kick the door,” Svend repeated. “You’ve got to make sure they are gone.”
“We ended up paying for a door. That was fine,” Svend said, shrugging his shoulders. “At least we knew they were gone.”
Val Severin told me that during the same operation, her teams did miss one person. They were going door to door in a trailer park. They knocked at one place and after receiving no answer taped a notice to the entrance. They didn’t know that an elderly lady who was hard of hearing was inside. She didn’t hear them. The next morning, she woke up and saw thick smoke. She looked outside, realized no one was around, and called 911. “It can happen,” said Valerie. Unlike the police, the SAR teams can’t search anyone’s property. “But we do the best we can, within our legal limits.”
One of the factors complicating the evacuation of 100 Mile House was that nearly 30 percent of its residents are over sixty-five. They weren’t necessarily going to be able to jump in a car and drive off just because an evacuation order was issued. Some had mobility issues; others didn’t own a vehicle. The RCMP officers and SAR members took it upon themselves not only to inform residents about the order but also to make sure they could follow it. “My teams would come in and report a residence that had an elderly lady, say, with no transportation,” Val explained. “So I would hand that information to Svend and he would coordinate with his members to go to that location and arrange transportation. In some cases, they would drive them out, or they might call an ambulance if the person was in a wheelchair or couldn’t transfer to an everyday vehicle. I had my teams keep moving from house to house because our goal was to share the information and we couldn’t get hung up.”
Despite such complexities, 100 Mile was evacuated within an hour. “I was amazed,” Mitch told me. He decided to stay. “I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to stay with my fire department and my staff because this was our command centre.” He felt that if he left, he would be abandoning his colleagues. “That’s just not something I could do. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll be the guy locking the door on the way out as it’s burning and flames are coming after us.’” At 3:00 in the morning, Mitch left the office. “You’re driving and it’s absolutely nothing. Like nobody is out. It’s just an eerie thing. I’m going home to an empty house in an empty town. What a devastation that was.”
For the next two weeks, Svend ate, slept and worked at the detachment office. “I’d get three hours of sleep a night and then get up at around 6:00 or 6:15, and grab some food that was out in the front office. Basically I’d be wearing my camouflage shorts and my Green Bay Packers t-shirt and I would live in that for hours and then finally someone would look at me and say, ‘Are you going to get dressed today—like in your uniform?’ And there were some days where I said, ‘No,’ because there were the phone calls, briefings, handling situations, you know people wanting to talk to me and I never got to that point.”
Certainly, Svend seemed fully imbued with that famous get ’er done Cariboo spirit.
“There was the time,” he said, “when we stopped the bus.” Buses were coming up every day with RCMP members destined for Williams Lake. Svend needed twelve more people, but he wasn’t getting the staff he requested at the time so he asked one of his members to stop the bus. “Stop the bus?” the officer asked, wondering if he heard correctly. “Yeah, stop the bus,” Svend repeated.
When the next RCMP bus for Williams Lake appeared in front of the detachment building, the officer went out into the road, hailed the driver and climbed aboard. Pointing to the unsuspecting RCMP members, he said, “You, you, you, you, you, you, off the bus.”
“I got slapped pretty hard for that one,” Svend admitted. “But you know at the end the day we got through to them that ‘Hey, you know, we continue to have a need here. It hasn’t gone away.’”
I laughed at this story about Svend’s heist. He is a wonderful raconteur and I was often amused as we talked. But he also had a serious side, which I saw when he was telling me about one of the women who worked at the detachment as a janitor. “She lost her house in the 105 area pretty much on the first day,” Svend said. Thinking she would need time off work to recover from this devastating blow, Svend told her she didn’t have to come in. “She came in the day 100 Mile was evacuated and said, ‘I need to work.’ I said ‘Is that going to help you?’ She goes, ‘Yep, that’s going to help me.’” When Svend told the story, he choked up. “I get emotional when I think about it.”
Her fortitude impressed Svend. He spoke about her to the officers working with him. During the fires, many of them were from out of town and didn’t know all the staff. He said, “You know that little lady you’ve seen walking around outside doing all the garbage? She lost her house three days ago. So put that in perspective when you’re walking around joking about stuff. She wants to talk to you. She wants to hear your stories, she wants to laugh. But she lost her house. So don’t be a dick.’
“I think it really helped to focus the group because it was amazing how many people would go and talk to her, just talk to her and share those stories,” he told me. “It elevated the morale and kept things in perspective.”
Meanwhile, the firefight continued. Roger, the fire chief, told me, “BC Wildfire Service decided to use a back burn to create what they called a super guard northwest of the mills. This was its last-resort kick at the can. The preparation and the planning that goes into these operations is immense.” First, the residents in two houses close to the fire line were alerted to what was coming and were allowed in to collect some of their valuables. Then BC Wildfire sent in crews to clear the nearby trees and ordered planes to drop fire retardant around the properties. The 100 Mile Fire Department and crews who were assisting them set up sprinklers and brought in water with a tender. The BC Wildfire Service ignited the burn on July 13, Roger recalled, “about a stone’s throw from here.” It aimed to take advantage of a hydro line that snaked its way across a hill between the Gustafsen Lake fire and the mills. Removing fuel adjacent to the line would make the break larger and give the town additional protection. A tall, pale-grey column of smoke roiled toward the sky and, though the winds were sometimes fitful in the area, that day they blew toward the northwest, away from the town. “It went well,” Roger said. “I would say that the tactic saved the town.”
By July 22 the danger was over. The evacuation order was rescinded and everyone returned. Svend remembered the celebration in the arena: “One corporal had been here for two weeks. So I said, ‘Just go down there and bask in the glow of what you did.’ And so he goes down, walks in the door, and this woman sees him walking in the door. She bursts out crying and hugs him for five minutes. Doesn’t happen every day.”
“For the most part we had so much love and thanks from the public,” Roger said. “It’s enough to last us a lifetime.”