The mayor of Ashcroft says two years later, the Elephant Hill wildfire is still fresh in the minds of many people.
Barbara Roden says she drove past the former Boston Flats trailer park on Sunday with the fire chief, during an event with the fire department, and says it struck her at that point that it had been two years since it burned down.
“After effects of the fire that you could still see, and where it started, etcetera, and it just suddenly hit me. I really hadn;t thought about it until that point, that ‘wow this is July 7th. Two years ago what a different, vastly different scene in Ashcroft. It really brought me up short to contrast two years ago on just a quiet Sunday in Ashcroft. So, so different.”
“Boston Flats trailer park, unfortunately there’s still nothing there. I understand a decision might still be pending, but it would be very expensive to rebuild down there and replace the infrastructure that was lost, so unfortunately the people who were down there have to find new places to live and in a lot of cases have left the area.”
Roden recalled one story of two Boston Flats residents who volunteered to help evacuate a seniors care home in the village, driving those people to Merritt.
“And those two bus drivers, who were volunteering to help our most vulnerable residents, were both residents of the Boston Flats trailer park. And at the time that they were helping to evacuate residents at Jackson House, they knew they had lost everything. And yet they were still there volunteering, making sure people were safe.”
Boston Flats was the hardest hit community by the human-caused fire, where 45 structures were destroyed. The fire destroyed more than 220 structures over the course of the summer and burned more than 192,000 hectares.
Roden says there are signs of renewal in some of the areas nearby where the fire destroyed properties. She says the anxiety level of people seems a little lower compared to the fire’s first anniversary last summer, but says the general feeling and awareness of wildfire is much more noticeable than prior to 2017.
(Photo: Twitter: Ryan Lake)
