KAMLOOPS — At first, the drive didn’t seem too bad.
Sally Aitken and her husband decided to leave their cabin in the West Chilcotin region due to wildfires on Sunday.
They were not ordered to get out, but had been without power for days and the only highway out had reopened.
Video of our escape through the Hanceville fires yesterday evening. Hwy 20 was open & it was still daylight above @JWagstaffe #bcwildfires pic.twitter.com/zE91oOD4dW
— Sally Aitken (@SallyNAitken) July 11, 2017
As they drove along Highway 20, they saw nothing overly dramatic: light smoke, burned trees. Then they suddenly they found themselves in the middle of an intense blaze, with flames leaping on either side of the road and smoke so dark they could barely see.
“Your choice is, when it gets bad, do you turn around … and then you have to go through what you’ve already been through, or do you just keep going? We just kept going,” recalled Aitken in an interview. “It was alarming, but you can’t panic because you’ve got to get out of the situation, and you’ve got to think clearly.”
Aitken, a professor in forest and conservation sciences at the University of British Columbia, shot a video of the harrowing experience and posted it on social media. She hopes the video will be instructive to people who are fleeing the hundreds of blazes across B.C.
“People really need to follow the advice of the professionals who are telling them when to evacuate,” she said. “But we also need to keep in mind that fire behaviour is very unpredictable. As quickly as the weather shifts, the fire shifts.”
The dynamic nature of the fires poses challenges for officials handling highway closures, said Mike Lorimer, a regional director at the Transportation Ministry.
When drivers come across heavy smoke, they should slow down, put their hazards on and keep driving, he said.
