The Thompson Nicola Regional District says two years later, and most property owners within their boundaries who were affected by the Elephant Hill wildfire have not rebuilt.

Chief building inspector Pat Luscombe says the regional district is waiving building permit fees for wildfire reconstruction, which he estimates would cost between $2,000 to $4,000 each.

Luscombe says the fee waiver deadline for reconstruction will be sometime next year, and he says about $170,000 is available.

“There was a deadline for the waiving of fees, all the applications were supposed to be in by August of 2019 in order to enable the waiving of the building permit fees. But now that’s been extended because of Red Cross funding, so it looks like we’ll be well into the year of 2020 before we have to throw another deadline at that,” he says.

“There’s approximately 73 buildings that were destroyed up in the Loon Lake and Pressy Lake area, for which we’ve had a number of applications to reconstruct those cabins and single-family dwellings up in that area. I think today we’ve got pretty close to 20 applications where we’ve either issued building permits or we’re processing building permits for issuance.”

Luscombe says the owner of Boston Flats trailer park is also eligible, but the 45 homes lost are not planned to be rebuilt at this point.

The human-caused Elephant Hill fire destroyed more than 200 structures altogether in its path of burning more than 192,000 hectares.

(Photo: Twitter: Ryan Lake)