Image Credit: Submitted/City of Kelowna

The death of Charlie Philpott and his family in a tragic 1990 slide east of Kelowna changed how people responded to emergencies throughout the Central Okanagan.

That slide, on Philpott Road, resulted in the Central Okanagan becoming the first regional district in the province to have a regional emergency plan.

It was tested to the fullest, and proved its worth during the Okanagan Mountain Park Wildfire in 2003.

“I don’t care who you are, nobody is trained for that big of an event,” Gerry Zimmermann, Kelowna’s fire chief at the time, told iNFOnews.ca recently. “You hope you have the planning in place before the major things happen. And that’s what we did with our emergency plan and that’s what saved our butt.”

That fire was started by lightning in the park south of the city on Aug. 16, 2003. Within days it destroyed 238 homes, a winery and forced the evacuation of 33,050 people, the second largest peacetime evacuation in Canada at the time.

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

Over the course of the following month, the fire burned 26,600 ha and destroyed 12 trestles along the Kettle Valley rail line above the city.

It could have been much worse if emergency workers learned nothing from the earlier slides.

From June 11-13, 1990, there were six “debris failures” along Philpott Road, 25 km east of Kelowna, according to a BC government report on the tragedy.

“The largest – a debris avalanche with an estimated magnitude of 23,000 cubic metres – engulfed a house and outbuildings and caused the death of three people,” the report said.

Charlie Philpott, his wife Betty and daughter Janet were all killed on June 12, 1990.

“Three people were killed and there was no central coordination,” Zimmermann said. “So I went to council at that time and said, what we need is a regional plan and not a municipal plan and they agreed.”

Gerry Zimmermann

Image Credit: Submitted/Black Mountain Irrigation District

Key to that plan was a clear delineation of responsibility so if a disaster was within a municipality, the local CAO was in charge, city, town or regional district.

“Disasters don’t stay within boundaries,” Zimmermann said. “My team always believed these things should be regional because they’re bigger. That’s how we set ours up.”

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

He wasn’t sure if it was the first such plan in the province but Beryl Itani, who was director of Emergency Social Services in the region since the mid-1980s and who helped draft the plan, said it was the first.

And it was done for more reasons than the slide.

“We became the first in the province to have a regional plan, partly because of the bridge at that time,” she said. “The old bridge used to go up at two o’clock in the afternoon and sometimes it came down and sometimes it didn’t. We were always afraid if something happened on the west side of the lake, we would not be able to get there. So we had teams in Peachland and in Westbank and on the Westside and a team in Kelowna and in Lake Country.”

That planning meant, when the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire in August 2003 headed toward Kelowna, firefighters were ready to jump into action and make decisions on the fly.

“It’s really weird,” Zimmermann said. “You deal with things a lot better than you think you’re going to because it’s very matter of fact. You don’t have three days to make a decision. You’ve got 10 seconds, usually. So basically, you’re just dealing with things as they happen and plan a little bit for tomorrow and the next day. Do you have time to get scared and nervous? A little bit. But really, you’re so busy that you don’t even think about that.”

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For Itani, it meant drawing on her pool of 40 trained volunteers to start organizing food and accommodation for evacuees. The province funds those for the first 72 hours.

“As things got worse, we just trained people on the spot,” Itani said. “At that particular point in time, everything was done on paper. So we just trained people on how to fill out the forms.”

Even though the regional emergency response plan had been around for a decade before the fire, there were still lessons to be learned and improvements to be made.

Some of those came from the McLure fire that was triggered by a discarded cigarette butt in a field. It started July 30, 2003.

That resulted in the loss of, or damage to 72 homes and nine businesses, including the Louis Creek sawmill that was never rebuilt. It was similar in size to the Okanagan Mountain Park fire, burning 26,420 ha.

It resulted in the evacuation of about 3,800 people in McLure, Louis Creek, Barrier and Little Fort.

“One of the things that we learned from the McClure fire was that people were not told what was happening and it was very frustrating for people,” Itani said. “So we decided, as the whole team, that one of the things we would do was let everybody know what was happening on a daily basis. That’s why there was a press conference almost every day. That was the thing that made the people here so trusting of the whole team because people knew what was happening. A lot of people knew ahead of time that their houses were burning.”

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They took evacuees in buses up to the burned areas to see the damage first hand. That’s something that’s been done after destructive wildfires ever since.

“We had this big meeting at Trinity (Baptist Church) where everybody was seated," Itani said. “Everybody was given an envelope. At one point, they were told to open their envelope and inside the envelope was: ‘Sorry, your house burned.’ or ‘Congratulations, your house wasn’t burned.’”

Itani took a training course in how to respond to emergencies in the early 1980s and followed up by going to the City of Kelowna to volunteer to run a program there.

“I came back so enthused and so excited about being prepared I made the promise to myself I would try to make Kelowna the best prepared city in British Columbia, if not Canada, if not the world,” Itani said. “Why not go big or go home?”

Did it work?

After the fire she was invited to speak at the World Emergency Preparedness Conference in Toronto.

“I was told afterwards I was the best presenter and it was the best presentation at the World Conference so, I guess I did good,” Itani said.

She retired as director of what is now called Emergency Support Services in 2011 but still volunteers.

The fire had a powerful effect on Zimmermann.

“It changes your life,” he said. “I lived a fairly quiet private life before this. It’s just not the case anymore. It’s all been good, don’t get me wrong, but you become a very public figure.”

He was touted as a hero as the face of the firefighting efforts because he gave the daily news briefings.

“It didn’t feel right,” Zimmermann said, referring to the hero reference. “I was doing the talking and a lot of the other people were every bit as important as I was, if not more so. That part of it, I always found it a little bit hard to take.”

He did go on to get elected to Kelowna city council in 2011 but Zimmermann did not run for re-election.

He’s retired from the fire department but still serves on the board of directors of the Black Mountain Irrigation District and the provincial Agricultural Land Commission.

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