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The village of Clinton, B.C., is largely still standing after an overnight battle against a raging wildfire, a local official confirmed on Saturday.
Brian Doddridge, with the village’s emergency operations centre, said he believed the “vast majority” of Clinton’s residential area had survived the encroaching flames.
Still, he said officials understood some structures were lost as flames from the Pear Lake wildfire reached the outskirts of the community late Friday.
They would work to assess the damage and notify the property owners, while the effort to hold the flames at bay was ongoing the following morning, said Doddridge, who was reached by phone in Kamloops, about 120 kilometres to the southeast.
Residents had been ordered to leave their homes on Friday, and while Doddridge was among a handful of village staff who initially remained behind to help manage the evacuation, he said they left at about 5 p.m., with the fire fast approaching.
Crews in the Fraser Canyon are busy trying to contain three wildfires around Boston Bar. Lori Daniels, co-director of the Centre for Wildfire Coexistence at UBC says the community is now flanked by flames to the south, west and northeast.
“The town was kind of shrouded in smoke, so it became hard to see anything beyond the immediate boundaries of the town,” Doddridge said. “But you could see the orange glow coming over the hill.”
Doddridge said he was aware some residents had opted to stay in their homes despite the evacuation order.
“They’ve been notified by the door knockers that it’s an extremely dangerous location in the hot zone there and that, you know, they are putting their lives in danger by being there,” he said.
Doddridge said fire crews had worked overnight to install sprinklers and beat back the Pear Lake blaze, one of three fires that make up the Big Bar wildfire complex.
The B.C. Wildfire Service has said all three were expected to continue growing, and crews were reassessing conditions to guide Saturday’s efforts.
Residents of the Village of Clinton have been ordered out due to a wildfire. Highway 97 through the area remains closed. CBC’s Shelley Joyce was there today as the order came down. And, in the Boston Bar area, two out-of-control fires have merged, burning over more than 264 square kilometres in total. Johna Baylon reports on that fire.
Doddridge said that “a lot of really great people” had been working around the clock to protect the village and its infrastructure, but the threat remains.
“We’re just kind of hanging our hopes on them right now,” he said.
Annette Roehlig lives in Clinton and has chosen to remain behind to defend her property.
“It’s my home,” she said. “I want to stay here, live here…. I want to keep my home.”
Roehlig said she watched the fire move fast toward the town from her property in the south area of Clinton.
“It was first small, some flames. And then the gust came up and there were flames that reached … maybe four levels of homes,” she said. “The firefighters were right there, and I saw it going away, backing up after the firefighters fought it.”
Another resident said the fire hit buildings in an industrial area south of the town.
Steven Larabie said the fire hit his tow truck business and his home, south of Clinton, overnight.
“I lost my home, my business that I’ve had for 35 years, all my tow trucks,” he told CBC News on Saturday.
Larabie said the fire moved fast and he barely got out in time.
