The Okanagan Mountain Park Wildfire destroyed 228 homes in Kelowna 20 years ago.

(MARSHALL JONES / iNFOnews.ca)

The orders had been given and bulldozers were on their way to the Upper Mission of Kelowna in a desperate effort to save the city from the Okanagan Mountain Park Wildfire of 2003.

“We had lost all those houses up in Crawford and we honestly thought it was going to come in and take the city right out,” Gerry Zimmermann, who was the City of Kelowna’s fire chief back then, told iNFOnews.ca leading up to the 20th anniversary of what, at the time, was the worst wildfire in B.C.’s history.

“The winds were blowing and the fire was howling. We had guys trapped in Kettle Valley. It was a mess. We figured, one last effort to save the city. What we were going to do was bulldoze a swath parallel to Barnaby Road. Then we’d bring in all our resources and try to hold that line.”

The fire was started by a lightning strike in Okanagan Mountain Park in the early hours of Aug. 16, 2003, a Saturday.

While that’s outside the City of Kelowna’s boundaries, Zimmermann was called into action right away.

READ MORE: Kelowna's Okanagan Mountain Park Wildfire at 20: What's changed?

“Forestry needed transportation across the lake,” he said. “We sent our fire boat down to Peachland. It picked them up and ferried them across to where the fire was.”

But later that afternoon the crew wanted to be transported back out.

“My guys radioed me and said: ‘If the guys come out, it could take off on them,’” Zimmermann recalls. “I said that’s not our call. I wish it would have been, but it wasn’t. So, we pulled them out and, of course, that night it took off on them and got away.”

Over the course of the following month, the fire burned 26,600 ha, forced the evacuation of 33,050 people, destroyed 238 homes, St. Hubertus Estate Winery and 12 trestles in Myra Canyon on the historic Kettle Valley rail line.

It was part of one of the worst wildfire seasons in B.C.’s history following four years of unusually dry weather. It was the worst drought conditions in 100 years in some Southern Interior areas.

READ MORE: How a deadly slide in Kelowna saved homes in a wildfire a decade later

While the fire was burning outside city limits, Zimmermann went to Kelowna City Council to get permission to move equipment outside city limits.

There was a big white house at the southern end of Lakeshore Road that he was worried about. That family was evacuated and Beryl Itani, director of the Emergency Social Services program sprang into action to find them a place to stay.

The next day she was asked to help another family, and a couple more the following day.

Then the wind shifted and it looked like the fire was headed for Naramata. Then it shifted again and all hell broke loose.

Fifteen homes in the Rimrock/Timberline area burned one night. The next night, 223 more were destroyed in Crawford estates.

“It was so weird what burned and what didn’t,” Zimmermann said. “You would have a house totally gone and a plastic tent sitting beside it on green grass. One root cellar burned down and the house survived. How do you burn down a root cellar?”

Itani got two reception centres set up. One was at Kelowna Secondary School for those whose last names started with A to K while those from L to Z were sent to Parkinson Recreation Centre.

“We were fortunate in one way in that everybody in Canada knew Kelowna was on fire, or thought Kelowna was on fire, so they stayed away,” Itani told iNFOnews.ca. “Yet if you lived downtown where I lived, you never would have known there was that kind of fire burning just to the south of us within the city limits because you couldn’t see it.

“People stayed away so every hotel and motel that we had in Kelowna, we filled with evacuees. Some of the evacuees had relatives on the other side of the lake so they went over there. Some of them had campers and fifth wheels. They pulled them into Walmart parking lot, Orchard Park parking lot. Those facilities were made available to us so we were able to look after absolutely everybody.”

Donations started pouring in so a group of volunteer accountants set up a bank account. That money was later distributed to those who lost their homes. Lesser amounts were paid to those whose properties were only damaged.

A vacant building on Bernard Avenue was used for merchant donations for those who had lost everything, ranging from cookbooks to cosmetics to toys.

Another building, on Hunter Court, was used for community donations.

“People were asked to donate good things, not just clean out your basement and clean out your house and get rid of things because these are people who had lost everything and they didn’t need your cast off stuff,’ Itani said. “They did need some replacements to get them through the next little while, but they certainly didn’t need people’s cast off junk. We asked people to be very careful about what they brought to us.”

People listened. What was left over was donated to the Salvation Army and very little of it went to the dump.

“It was a time of every emotion,” Itani said. “It was one of the worst experiences in some respects but it was also one of the best experiences. I couldn’t be more proud of the team of people I was working with. I couldn’t have been more proud of the people of Kelowna. We came together as community, probably for the one and only time in a long time.”

READ MORE: Feds say Canada on track to have worst wildfire season ever

But before all that could happen, Zimmermann and his crew had to put the fire out.

Well, not quite out.

“We weren’t putting out the big stuff,” Zimmerman said. “We were putting out the spot fires that were blowing up over the top because, once that wall is coming, you didn’t have a chance, You just got out of its way. We were steering a little bit and putting out spot fires but, as far as putting out the main fire itself, that wasn’t even part of the plan. That wasn’t going to happen.”

He had a crew of about 20 firefighters in the Kettle Valley area near the south end of the city on the night he was going to bulldoze houses along Barnaby Road.

“They were busy putting out spot fires,” Zimmerman said. “The next thing they knew, their access had been cut off. The fire had blown over top of them. They said the walls were about 400 feet high."

They got in their trucks and drove further south.

“They parked in a big green field there and got under their trucks and hoped that it would blow over,” Zimmermann said. “They said it was freaky. They said it was like jet planes coming, that's what it sounded like, and flames 400 feet high.”

At the same time, he had ordered the heavy equipment in to bulldoze the houses to build a fire guard above the Lower Mission.

“That was the only tool we had,” Zimmermann said. “We had no other choice. It was going to be better to get our resources pulled back to one general area. At that point we had them in Kettle Valley. We had them down at the lake. We had them all over trying to put out the spot fires.”

So, why did he change his mind? Did he second guess himself then or at any other time during the firestorm?

“I never did,” Zimmermann said. “That sounds arrogant. I don’t mean it to be, but in those situations you’ve got to make a decision and you’ve got to stick with it.”

He was asked by a reporter at the time, if the decision not to bulldoze would have been the right one?

“I said, if we had done it, it would have been the right decision,” was his reply. “That was the strategy. We made the decision in no time at all and we were about to implement it. We even had the machines lined up and on the way out there, it started to rain and it poured. It was pouring so hard there were furrows in the road.”

That same rainstorm dampened the fire in Kettle Valley that threatened the crew there.

“As soon as it started pouring, they were in business again,” Zimmermann said.

Yet, it was dry as a bone at the Enterprise Road firehall where he was stationed.

“I’ve heard these big, big events can create their own weather patterns,” Zimmermann said. “I don’t know if that’s true or not but we didn’t get a drop of rain down here.”

While the height of the fire was relatively brief in terms of damage to homes, it continued to burn towards houses in the June Springs area. There were concerns about it reaching Joe Rich along Highway 33 and it did destroy the trestles before it was declared contained on Sept. 16.

In the end, Zimmermann doesn’t focus on the 238 homes lost.

“We saved two to three times that amount,” he said. “That was our whole mantra. It’s not what we lost, it’s what we saved and we said that from the beginning. The guys were obviously upset, everybody was. What we had to get across to people was that there was some good things happening too. People were pulling together. We were actually saving homes. The guys who got trapped in Kettle Valley, if they hadn’t been up there, we would have lost the whole subdivision, I think.”

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