(MARSHALL JONES / iNFOnews.ca)

I was on evacuation alert for part of the drama in Kelowna and West Kelowna this past week.

It’s become a summer ritual now, to pack our GTFO bags, make sure vehicles are always filled with fuel and our getaway camping supplies and make evacuation plans with the kids.

It’s as much a part of summer in the Okanagan now as sunscreen and beach towels.

I got wondering when we starting accepting this as normal?

The anxiety and terror that blows in every year somewhere in Kamloops or the Okanagan is not normal.

It’s certainly not even necessary.

What will it take to fireproof our communities? I mean, logistically, not much. We need to cut a wide swath around every neighbourhood, perhaps plant some leafy trees or other fire breaks between homes and the bush.

Does there have to be Hawaii- or California-level death tolls before we get serious about this? Maybe for insurance companies to pull out of covering BC like several have done in California?

Marshall Jones, managing editor

Heck, there’s a new neighbourhood being built not far from the West Kelowna fire right now — directly on the edge of the bush.

We never even consider it unless a fire is on our doorstep, in which case it’s too late.

Local governments could fix this with a raise of their hands, with zoning amendments to include interface buffers. Surely the provincial government could help make that happen.

I can’t for the life of me figure out why this isn’t being done. Right NOW!

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I don’t know why everyone will forget about these fires the moment they are out, but they will. Two years ago, after the White Rock Lake fire, we tried to push our fire coverage into the winter, after I declared I would not relent on fire coverage until something was done to protect our communities.

We finally abandoned the project somewhere around November because it mustered nothing but crickets.

Maybe in a year when we get yet another report on this record-breaking wildfire season, our governments will act.

But then again, they haven’t done a thing since the last report. Or the one before that. Or the one before that. Or the one before that.

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Gerry Zimmermann is long gone as Kelowna fire chief and with him went a fully useful and effective Emergency Operations Centre.

Zimmermann called the shots in Kelowna in 2003. He was candid and told it to us straight and made sure every scrap of information people wanted to know was answered and if not, he’d tell us why it can’t be answered and how long it would take to get the information.

“That’s why we had calm,” he has said many times.

He’s right, of course. Sure he didn’t have social media to contend with but the principle remains.

I don’t know what you saw on social media through the emergency, but there was ample evidence of panic, fed in part by bad information allowed to run rampant on social media (thanks again, Zuckerberg). The so-called “scanner” sites and others were reporting information straight from the fire department scanner.

Scanner information has always been terribly unreliable. But they won’t tell you that. So people were left thinking homes were burning where they weren’t.

I saw people in the Mission panicking about evacuating. That was far, far outside the danger area.

Numerous reports in the middle of the evacuation kept coming in about the highway being closed or the Bennett bridge being closed. None of it was true.

Zimmermann taught — or we thought he taught — all the bureaucrats that information neutralizes panic.

Other than the odd exception, this EOC has been late with information, guarded it, was seemingly bothered with and disinterested in actually answering questions that might have made people feel more secure.

Simple things like: Where is the fire? Where is it moving? That kinda stuff.

What a damn shame.
 

— Marshall Jones is the Managing Editor of iNFOnews.ca

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