Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Rain cools Pemberton evacuation orders

Firefighters continue to battle hot spots in the ground, fear return of hot weather
58949_l

The rain has come, the fires are calming and residents of the Upper Pemberton Meadows are being allowed to return home, the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District confirmed Tuesday.

The district issued a statement at 11 a.m. Tuesday confirming that residents living north of the Lillooet River from 9440 Hurley River Road up to the Howe Sound Outdoor School can return home. The Hurley Forest Service Road has also reopened and the Evacuation Alert for the Pemberton Meadows north of Wilson Road has been lifted.

The areas have borne witness to massive fires on both Copper Mountain and the east side of the Camel's Back in recent weeks, fires that have blanketed the valley in smoke and caught Meadows residents in the middle.

As of Tuesday, the fires measured in at 850 hectares each - about four times the area of Whistler's Lost Lake Park. Both estimates are up from a week ago but they're remaining steady at their current size.

Wednesday estimates pegged the Copper Mountain fire at 838.4 hectares and the Camel's Back at about 658 hectares.

The SLRD's decision to lift the evacuation order likely came as welcome news to Thomas Postrach, who lives with his family in a cabin at the Howe Sound Outdoor School, which is located beneath Copper Mountain.

Since being ordered to evacuate on July 31 they've been staying in a tent at the Nairn Falls campground because they didn't like staying in a local hotel. Speaking to Pique on Monday before the order was lifted, he said an RCMP officer came and visited him in the middle of the night when an alert was issued and later came again to evacuate him.

"We had a nice light show the first couple of nights," he said. "Then in the middle of the night one day they came with the evacuation alert, they came with it, and then when was it, last Friday, a week ago, they ordered us out."

The evacuation order lasted 11 days.

Coastal Fire Information Officer Mike McCulley told Pique in an interview that cooler weather and rain over the past few days have turned the Rank Three to Four fires to "creeping ground behaviour" and helped crews make good progress in putting them out.

"Things are looking good although we're still cautious," he said. "I just found out this morning that some of the rain that was predicted we may not get, so we could be back into hot, dry weather here real quick."

McCulley added that the chance of rain is decreasing daily and that crews would need a "heck of a lot more rain" in order to put the fires out.

"There was supposed to be some more later in the week and they're not quite sure if we're going to get that now or not," he said. "It seems like a high pressure system is building again."

Though he's uncertain if more rain will come, McCulley said the falling water has nevertheless made a difference.

To illustrate the difficulty of putting out fires, he said if you take the top foot of the earth and split it into three sections, the nine inches towards the bottom can stay "bone dry" and hold fire for months. Firefighters on Copper Mountain and the Camel's Back are thus digging into the ground and trying to put the fire out at its source.

"Some of the fires burning in the province are so big that no rain would put them out," he said. "That won't happen at all, they're going to have to be put out by ground crews."

Marty van Loon is the owner of Pemberton Valley Farms, a property that raises seed potatoes and beef cattle at the base of Copper Mountain. He and his family have been on the farm since the early 1960s and they've never seen fires like the one above them or the Camel's Back fire just across the valley.

"We've never been this close and threatened by a forest fire," he said. "It started out with a puff of smoke way up high on both mountains. The one mountain, Copper, was about 4,500 feet, and never did I think it would come on to the valley floor."

The fire never hit his property but it did reach the valley elsewhere, and was put out very quickly.

Van Loon said the forest fires have made some sleepless nights for his family, spurred in part by the concern about their home catching fire or having the Camel's Back fire reach across the bottom of the valley and on to their property. They can see both fires through the windows of their home.

Though the road is open, the Hurley Forest Service Road is still subject to some fire behaviour and the Ryan River Forest Service Road remains closed.

Backcountry Hiking restrictions remain in place due to fire activity, including all hiking and access trails close to Tenquille Lake, and trails linking Owl Creek and the Birkenhead River Watershed.

Elsewhere in the corridor, a 1.5-hectare fire flared up Aug. 8 in the Murrin Park area, about 10 kilometres south of Squamish. The cause of that fire is believed to be a minor explosion on some power lines. Ten firefighters tackled the fire and it's now completely contained, according to a news release from B.C.'s Wildfire Management Branch.