30, 000 forced to flee Canadian fire

Kelowna, British Columbia.

An estimated 30,000 people found themselves exiled from their homes in Kelowna, British Columbia, yesterday by a wildfire so hot that at times it caused houses to explode.

Nearly a third of this western Canadian vacation city's residents have evacuated because of the Okanagan Mountain fire, and thousands more remained on high alert in case the flames reached further into residential areas. Emergency officials ordered 20,000 people to flee with only a few minutes warning on Friday evening as the forest fire began to "crown" - or move rapidly from tree top to tree top. Similar conditions forced 10,000 to evacuate late on Thursday.

"It's almost impossible to stop a crown fire that's moving like this one," said Darron Campbell, a spokesman for the British Columbia Forest Service. Witnesses reported seeing entire suburban subdivision on fire in the city's southern outskirts late Friday as the flames leaped from building to building, some of which could be seen exploding from the intense heat.

"It's awful. I just can't believe this is happening," Debbie Curylo, 44, a life-long Kelowna resident, said as she watched the massive orange flames erupting in a forested hillside neighborhood where two of her sisters had houses. Officials were not expected to have a preliminary estimate on the number of homes lost until noon yesterday. No deaths or major injuries had been reported despite two consecutive nights of frantic evacuations.

The fire outside Kelowna, in the Okanagan Lake region about 300 km east of Vancouver, began on August 16 with a lightning strike in the mountains. It was estimated at 17,000 hectares before it began its latest advance.

British Columbia, suffering its worst forest fire season in decades, has been under a state of emergency since the beginning of August. Some areas in the southern half of the province have seen little or no rain in weeks. Several small showers moved through the Kelowna area late on Friday and early yesterday, helping dampen the flames, but no major rainfall was forecast until at least late this week.

"This is a long way from over," Campbell said. The Okanagan Mountain fire was one of several large blazes burning out of control in south-central British Columbia. Several hundred people have been evacuated because of the other fires.

Residents have been warned to stay out of forests and off wilderness roads and campsites in the southern half of the province, which is Canada's third largest and roughly the size of France and Germany combined.