A woman, who lost her home in the Lytton fire, is asking why more wasn’t done to alert people to get out of the town sooner.
Many are saying that the fire engulfed the town within 15 minutes, but Casandra Melanson says that’s not true.
“Around like 5:20ish it seemed like there was a fire in town. So I tweeted about it and I asked if anyone knew there was a fire in town and then the smoke just got bigger and bigger.”
She says she had less than 15 minutes to collect any possessions. “I started packing especially because ash was falling from the sky really heavily. I couldn’t even go outside without glasses. My eyes were burning from the ash and by the second time I went to my car the entire front of my house, all the grass in front of my house, was on fire.”
“I threw my stuff frantically in the car. I was wearing two masks on my face at the time because I couldn’t even breathe. And the day before it happened I kept getting bloody noses because we had like 2% humidity and it was 48 degrees.”
Melanson evacuated to Merritt and has been trying to find out if everyone is safe, but she is skeptical. “I have been following the Facebook page of people who have confirmed to be evacuated but in my eyes there’s two names missing.”
Reports indicate that BC’s Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe believes there are two fatalities out of Lytton, but it remains unsafe to get into the town.
“So I called my friend and he was just up to road from me in Lytton. It was about 20 minutes before he could see the fire on his street and it surrounded him. It was behind his house, it was across the street in front of the other houses. It came up the train tracks. The train tracks run through town and it came up on both sides of the train tracks. It literally hugged the town, the fire.”
Melanson believes that people could easily have been made aware of how dangerous the situation was well before the Mayor issued an evacuation order.
“I was up all night looking at the tweets and stuff because they never issued an evacuation alert. The Mayor did, 90 minutes after I evacuated my house. And as I left my house, it was on fire… I could see my living room engulfed in flames as I shut the door to leave. It felt like fire was literally running behind me as I was running to my car.”
“When I was safe to stop on the highway I made all those tweets and was trying to get them to issue an evacuation alert. But from what I’ve seen and from what they posted, the fire spread to Botanie and the people living on Botanie were not aware of the fire because they did not receive any evacuations notice or alert. Some of them were able to make it out because some people from town drove through and got the people they knew out. I don’t know if everyone there is accounted for because they were not told that it was an emergency.”
Melanson says as she was leaving there were some people that seemed somewhat relaxed as things were beginning to flare up. “As I was leaving, people on Main Street were walking calmly because there was an evacuation alert, but it was rescinded. You could see one helicopter and a plane in the air. So I feel like people just thought ‘Oh, they’re on it. We’re safe.'”
She says there should have been more of a warning then what some people are saying. “I know some articles say that it swept the town in 15 minutes, but that’s not true. The people in St Bartholomew’s Health Centre , they were made aware at 5:00 to start evacuating because the flames got close to them. I could see the smoke around 5:10 and I got out around 5:25/5:30. It made it to the top of the other side of town at around 5:56.”
“So the people on the corner and edge of town, I don’t how long it took for that to burn before it got to the hospital, but 56 minutes is how long it was burning from the middle of town to the south end of town. That’s a long time. That’s not 15 minutes.”
“Even after people got out, even after the evacuation order was issued 90 minutes after my house was on fire, the town was already on fire for over 100 minutes… [Mayor Jan Polderman] made that evacuation alert. But that alert was something that got posted online. People didn’t get notifications on their phone, so people living in Botanie and up in that area, people were completely unaware.”
“It shouldn’t have happened.”
“I regret not banging on doors as I was leaving , but I was hyper-ventilating so much and I’m asthmatic and I had to take my masks off…. I was in a panic as I was leaving with all the fire in front of my house.”
“I just want to know why there wasn’t an alert…. Why aren’t they using this texting system we have?”
Did the fires make it to Lytton? Legit ready to pack and leave rn. Scary #LyttonBC @weathernetwork pic.twitter.com/xFqlkNV6wV
— Cassandra (@MCasperc) June 30, 2021
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