It Is "our own business"!

That's what a complete stranger to the both of us said when he told me to "mind my own business." He was walking into dry grass at the top of Dilworth Mountain with a lit cigarette in his hands while we all watched the fire across the valley in Kelowna, and I had asked him to step back on the street if what he was holding was in fact a lit cigarette.

"What? Do you think I'm stupid?" he said. I have to admit that words actually failed me at the time. I finally pointed at the 2 RCMP officers about 5 cars away and asked if he wanted to talk to them about it.

I'd been out on a borrowed bicycle getting some exercise riding around Kelowna. Shirley, my wife, and I had decided that with much of her family in Kelowna and two of her sisters and their families on evacuation notice we had to go and see what had happened over the preceding three weeks of forest fire activities. Saturday, the day we arrived, was still enough that the smoke from the fires made visibility almost nil. We spent most of the day visiting friends and relatives and listening to stories about the previous weeks since the Okanagan Mountain Fire had begun with a lightning strike.

Sean, an acquaintance of our friends, Carola and Ken who we met at the Oyama Legion, was in the area building new homes when he was told to evacuate. In fact, the 5 new sites they were building were initially counted as "burned" homes until the authorities learned that they had only been foundations to start with. The confusion was understandable given that many of the homes I saw on a later Sunday afternoon's drive through the first part of the burned area were little more than foundations. I took pictures (real film) that are now at the processors, and I'll post some here to show the devastation.

He (Sean) and the others on their construction crew saw some of the action first hand. August 24th, the fire jumped its guard, pushed by winds of 70+kph (45mph). The area was so dry that trees "candled" in seconds and the updraft drove branches and large pieces of bark so high that they were landing miles away on the other side of the valley. Later reports said that the fire leapt as much as 800-1200 meters ahead of the actual fire line, starting fires well ahead of where people were fighting. Sean and the others got out as fast as they could.

That was just one example of the personal glimpses we heard. Even before this I had been hearing all manner of news reports and incipient legends in the making from the hundreds of fires throughout the province. The Barriere,  MacLure, and other fires near Kamloops, near Chase, and of course the Okanagan Mountain Park fire; all of them so called "interface" fires where man meets forest. Man meets nature a lot around BC. Just as much around Vancouver as around the Interior cities and towns. This year it just turns out that nature is not only taking a beating from man-created fires but also getting in a few licks of its own.

The drought, the fires, both are providing fodder for what is turning out to be a backlash against smokers. The next while should be interesting.