A year on, Lytton deserves answers

Yesterday marked a terrible anniversary: one year since a wildfire destroyed Lytton, B.C. The community needs action, and deserves answers.

A few days ago, my daughter called from what’s left of Lytton. We talked about the weather, how blue skies and summer heat turned deadly a year ago.

“Spooky, this hot weather,” I said. “It’s only 25 C,” she pointed out. “It was twice as hot last year.”

Twice as hot. I knew the numbers, but the observation still shocked me. I had just returned from a short walk and should have worn a hat; my forehead and nose were a bit sunburned. Twice as hot, it had turned out for hundreds of people in B.C., was incompatible with life.

My daughter and her fiancé, both B.C. wildfire fighters, were working in Lytton on June 30, 2021. They had just bought their first house, a modest bungalow on the east side of Highway 1. After years of living and working in Lytton, they had grown to love the community and decided to put down roots.

In 20 nightmarish minutes, everything changed.

This isn’t my story to tell. Like me, my daughter writes, and she is still processing what happened to her, her friends and the place she calls home.

What happened for me was this: checking news on my phone, I learned a fire had started in Lytton. My daughter and her fiancé were working, so a call from me would have been an unwelcome interruption and I didn’t try to reach them. I was concerned but not worried. Experienced wildfire fighters, they had both been deployed to dangerous infernos — Elephant Hill, Fort McMurray — and had felt welltrained and prepared for what they experienced. Other fires were burning in B.C., but the fire season — lately we have normalized calling summer the fire season — hadn’t truly begun.

On sunny days in June I am often tempted to go for a bike ride. But 50 degrees Celsius isn’t recreating weather, it’s stay-inside-and-try-not-to-die weather, so I stayed at my desk with the air conditioning on and watched the news. For a couple of hours there were no significant updates. Later I would learn that the fire had disabled cell towers, cutting off communication with the village and its residents. Evacuees. Survivors.

In the early evening, reports started coming in that Lytton had burned to the ground. All of it, the whole village. Panic set in, and I started making phone calls. Around 11 p.m. I heard from my daughter at last. She and her fiancé were alive, but they were not all right. She wasn’t prepared to talk about what had happened in Lytton that day. She is still unable to talk about it. Incredibly, their new home was still standing. Many of their possessions, stored downtown, had been incinerated. They were the lucky ones, she said.

A year has elapsed and little has been done to rebuild. Lofty promises made by politicians in the days and weeks following the fire have fizzled. At the COP26 climate summit in November, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau related the story of Lytton in dramatic past tense, emphasizing its permanent destruction. His speech puzzled and enraged Lytton’s survivors, scattered across the province, staying with family and friends, waiting for help and explanations.

In October 2021, a Transportation Safety Board report found no evidence trains had been a factor in the Lytton fire, yet numerous eyewitnesses had reported seeing a “train on fire” travelling near or through the village.

Why has so little been done for Lytton? How come people who escaped with nothing but their lives still don’t have answers? Six months after the Fort McMurray fire, rebuilding efforts were well underway. Yesterday will have been a difficult day for the displaced and discouraged survivors of the Lytton fire.

Disastrous climate change-fuelled fires aren’t going away. It could be your community next — something to think about on this sombre anniversary.