the fire season you are going through in canada this year? we have fire seasons everywhere in the area i m in, but nothing like this before a record number of hectares burned, as you mentioned. with the intense heatwaves we have had, it is the winds driving those flames. what we saw on thursday night, it s unlike anything i ve ever seen before and i ve been here for ten years covering these fires. 20 years ago, we had a very big fire in the kelowna area, where 230 homes were lost. that is the fire of record in this region that everybody talks about. this time around, people are sayin, is this as bad as that one? we don t yet have the numbers of properties that have been lost. but it s safe to imagine it is in the many dozens if not in the hundreds already. this year is worse than anything i have seen before.
they didn t have the resources to tackle them. of course the heatwave came and they exploded in size and forced evacuations there, burned many homes in that community. not only him, but others have said, look, we need more resources. but they are really stretched thin, only so many wildlife firefighters. we do have crews from other countries, from australia, mexico and some other countries, here as well. as well as out of province firefighters. but it hasn tjust been british columbia, there are other areas in canada. it s been a really catastrophic year for wildfires. just to put it on perspective, i ve been looking at this graph from the website and it shows how much area has burned this year, 15 million hectares, about three times worse than previous fire seasons. can you briefly give us a sense of how you would describe
area, and they have told tourists to leave, to keep hotel rooms open for the local residents who need them as there are so many homes here under evacuation orders. we ve been seeing the evacuations in other areas of canada as well. we saw long lines of people waiting for aerial evacuations. authorities obviously have a lot on their plates. hundreds of fires burning in the general area there. does it seem to you that there are enough resources to get these blazes under control? yeah, that is a very good question. the answer is no, because there s just so many catastrophic fires and there are only so many resources to put at them. we had a first nations chief in a community about an hourfrom here, he was very vocal in his complaints over two lightning strike fires from last month, several weeks ago, that were in a remote area.
there, so it s all hands on deck in bc interior. you mentioned people being evacuated and all these folks having to flee their homes. how much danger are these communities in the area facing? yeah, it s a good question. we have heard of no loss of life yet. that is the main priority, of course. people are kind of used to, unfortunately, fire emergencies in the interior bc. many people have been through evacuations before. the fires have been so aggressive and dramatic that when people are told to go, they have gone, and a very well co ordinated effort to get people out of the danger areas. many people sleeping in their cars because they don t have enough hotel rooms. the government has put a state of emergency, the provincial government, and they ve ordered people not to come to this area. it s a very popular tourist