The owner of a resort near Boston Bar, B.C., says part of his business has burned to the ground as a group of wildfires continues to grow in the area.
Shayne Findlay, the owner of Blue Lake Resort in B.C.’s Fraser Canyon, says he knew he had lost some buildings from watching a webcam — but he only realized the extent of the loss when he got to the scene.
“It looks alien. The hills are burned. There’s trailers burned. There’s wreckage everywhere,” Findlay told CBC’s Daybreak Kamloops.
The three fires burning in the area, known as the Brunswick complex, together covered nearly 200 square kilometres, or 20,000 hectares, as of Wednesday night. They’ve forced numerous evacuation orders and alerts and closed part of Highway 1.
Findlay said a cabin built by his father has been lost, as well as a cabin Findlay built next to it when he was younger. Staff housing is also destroyed, along with storage buildings and multiple trailers, according to Findlay.
“We’re not the only ones who’ve lost,” he said. “There’s a lot of hurt going on right now.”
He said he has decided to shut down the resort for the summer to focus on cleaning up.
“It’ll take a team of arborists working for a week just to get the trees down to a point where it’s safe enough, where you can say, ‘OK, now we can start cleaning up.'”
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Findlay said the wind has been the story of these fires.
“Watching on that webcam, I thought, I’ll lose everything. The embers were going up and down and sideways and I watched buildings flaring so hot that it was, you know, melting.”
The Brunswick complex includes the Brunswick Creek wildfire burning west of Highway 1, the Ainslie Creek wildfire burning east of the highway, and a third very small wildfire (0.3 hectares) burning between the two.
All three are suspected to be human-caused, a designation given to any fire not ignited by lightning.
