The McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the mountainside above houses in West Kelowna, B.C., on Friday, August 18, 2023.
Image Credit: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
January 02, 2024 - 7:00 PM
A survivor of this summer’s McDougall Creek wildfire wrote a book on the experience of being evacuated and taking refuge in a hotel room, but also as a call to action for the community as the consequences of climate change worsen.
Claudia Kargl lives in Smith Creek and evacuated her home, Aug. 16, with her husband and her cat when the McDougall Creek wildfire hit, this was the third time her family had been forced to evacuate because of wildfires.
“I couldn’t believe it and I thought ‘uh, oh here we go again, this is serious’ so we didn’t waste any time," Kargl says. "When you have a beautiful home, an award-winning garden, an art gallery, a performing arts studio with three performance pianos and you go to each room and ask yourself 'what can I take,’ it hits you and it does so even worse when it’s the third time you’re doing it and asking yourself if it’s the last time you’ll see your home.”
They took refuge in a hotel room for 11 days and went through a roller coaster of emotions.
To cope, Kargl wrote Survival 11 Days in 1 Room. She started writing as they drove away from their home seeing the balls of fire come down the mountain.
The book recounts her experience and her feelings as an evacuee and as a concerned citizen.
“I wrote about all the emotions: the stress prior to evacuating, the anxiety of evacuating, the fear, the anger, the confusion, the relief we got to find a room in a hotel, and then finding out our house didn’t suffer significant damage and then trying to find out what that really means," she says. "Throughout the course of 11 days, I was immersed in taking it all in and capturing it on paper and as a certified photographer, capturing it through photography.
“It was unbelievable when you go from a huge house to one room and not having any of the necessities, and having no table, no chairs, the fridge freezing over, our cat being completely traumatized, it just went on and on and on, and after a few days you almost feel like a refugee in your own country.”
While writing the book was therapeutic, what she hopes readers take away from it are the emotions and the fear of what it’s like to have to be evacuated and not knowing whether or not your home will be destroyed.
She says people aren't taking the wildfire situation seriously enough.
"The drought conditions have again hit us hard, I could see it in our garden, in our water bill," she says. "Climate change has been in the news more than ever in the past year and people in our community weren’t doing much about it. We did everything we could do be vigilant and FireSmart while our neighbours did nothing. So it hit me, even more, this year to do something and to write about this.”
Kargl also hopes that readers understand that something can be done to avoid this in the future and take the wildfire and her testimony as a warning sign.
"It's a full 360 degrees of emotions, jam-packed into the story... realizing that this is part of a larger, bigger issue that is climate change and how it’s affecting us and how things are changing drastically in the Okanagan and how we as a community have to do much more," she says.
"There should be many more provisions and funds to be made to help our community as a whole,” she says. “The fires are a warning sign: nature is telling us that everything is not fine and next time around we might not be that lucky.”
Survival 11 Days in 1 Room is available on Amazon here.
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