Martin Mars bomber fighting a fire on the Mid-Coast, 1996. Courtesy Weyerhaeuser

September rains have brought a close to what has been called the worst forest fire season in fifty years. For six weeks, a provincewide state of emergency prevailed in British Columbia. At the height of the crisis, raging blazes around Barriere, Kamloops, Armstrong and Kelowna forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes and destroyed millions of dollars worth of property. The backcountry was declared off limits to travellers, and even Vancouver-area parks and trails were closed as week after week of hot weather left forests tinder dry and ready to burst into flame.

Statistically, the summer of 2003 was not that much different from any other summer. By the end of the season there had been 2,460 fires. The annual average over the past ten years is 1,805 fires, but there have been exceptionally destructive summers, notably 1998 when there were more than 4,000 blazes, almost half the wildfires in Canada that year.

About half the wildfires each year are caused by humans and half by lightning.

What made the summer of 2003 so disastrous was that some of the fires burned so close to urban areas and in a few cases actually invaded residential neighbourhoods. Almost the entire village of Louis Creek, north of Kamloops, was burned to the ground. A total of 66 residences were destroyed there, along with a sawmill that provided employment for local residents. This fire, which also beseiged Barriere and McLure, was one of the worst of the summer. However, in terms of destructiveness, it took second place to the Okanagan Mountain Park blaze on the east side of Okanagan Lake. High winds drove this fire deep into the southern suburbs of Kelowna, incinerating 248 homes. In total, almost 30,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes, not just in the Kelowna and Louis Creek-Barriere-McLure areas but also in Kamloops, Armstrong and Chase as fires threatened those communities as well. Electricity and phone service to large parts of the province were cut off and major highways had to be closed.

(Previously, the worst wildfires in terms of property destruction had been the Penticton fire of 1994, which destroyed 18 homes, and the Silver Creek-Salmon Arm fire of 1998, which destroyed 16 residences and forced the evacuation of 7,500 people.)

Homes were not the only structures to fall victim to the fires. Southeast of Kelowna in the Myra Canyon, the Okanagan Park fire destroyed twelve of the sixteen railway trestles that were part of the Kettle Valley Railway. Built prior to World War One, the majestic wooden trestles were a national historic site and were incorporated into a well-used bicycle trail.

The fires exhausted the usual corps of firefighters and trained recruits had to be called in from municipalities around the province. Outside help came from as far away as Ontario, and even the army was mobilized in the form of more than 700 soldiers, the largest use of military personnel in BC since the 1948 Fraser River flood. In all, more than 7,600 firefighters were involved, and the cost of fighting the fires exceeded half a billion dollars, making the 2003 fire season the costliest natural disaster in the province's history.