Small Town Week, Episode 3: One BC town’s struggle to rise from the ashes

CLIP You are listening to a Frequency Podcast network production.

Jordan Heath Rawlings For all the talk of this wildfire season being the worst in Canada’s history, there is one town in a fire prone area for which that simply won’t be true. Because there is no town to burn anymore.

CLIP I’ve ordered the town evacuated and I’ve told everyone, as I was leaving town, to leave. It took a whole 15 minutes from you know the first sign of smoke to suddenly the entire, you know everywhere.

Jordan Heath Rawlings That was the mayor of Lytton, BC in the hours after a fire that wiped the town off the map in 2021. In the weeks and months to come the town, as well as the province, pledged that this would not be the end of Lytton. That the community would rebuild and come back stronger. Two years later, that work has barely begun. Does that represent a failure or just reality? It’s hard to say, after all, how do you a rebuild an entire town and community from scratch? When the resources that you would usually use to rebuild homes or businesses are also destroyed. Should the town, which holds the record for being the hottest place in Canada, as well as a location in an area vulnerable to types of fires, rebuild on the same spot? Is that wise? What happed to Lytton BC and its people when the media moved on to other fires and new climate disasters?

I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Tyler Olsen is an editor and reporter at the Fraser Valley Current. Hello Tyler.

Tyler Olsen Hi. Thanks for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings You’re welcome. Thanks for finding time for us. I wanted to start maybe by just asking you to, take us to Lytton, BC. Where is it? What was it like?

Tyler Olsen So Lytton is a couple hundred kilometers from North East of Vancouver, it’s up the Fraser Canyon and at the confluence of two of BC’s largest rivers, the Fraser River and the Thompson River. It’s location is really important. Both, both historically and for, for the events that happened in 2021. If you are familiar with BC you are familiar with the Fraser Canyon. it’s the point where the wet coastal climate of the lower mainland and Vancouver Island, essentially transitions to a much drier, hotter, interior climate. So Lytton’s located on the Trans Canada Highway and its location at the confluence of those two rivers, the Fraser and the Thompson has been, critical for its entire history. Its history dates back thousands and thousands of years. It was settled by Indigenous people and, and, and we do, we obviously don’t have written history from that time, but we know that it was a key trading route. There are key fishing grounds in the area and so the village site and the surrounding area was, has been inhabited for thousands of years. Lytton’s history is very much the history of British Columbia I think. It has commonalities all throughout from settlement to to the present day. We can see that the Trans Canada, Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railway CN Rail and CP Rail, both run through the Fraser Canyon and through Lytton. It’s position on the Fraser River makes it pretty much the key transportation route between the BC interior and the BC coast. And it’s been that way for hundreds and probably thousands of years. Because of that, when British Columbia was settled, Lytton was a key stopping point during the gold rush. It grew over the years. So in 1858 when the BC Gold Rush started just north of Lytton, really, conflict between the Indigenous people in the Lytton area and the American settler or the American miners boiled up into a short but bloody conflict that’s known as the Fraser Canyon War. So we have that history, there where we’ve seen settlement and the clash between history and progress. And throughout the next century, we saw the entire development of British Columbia funnelled in a way through that Fraser Canyon. People used the railways to get across the country, not just across BC but across the country. The Trans Canada Highway was built through there, and so Lytton is a tiny place in a, in a, in a canyon, that is a very steep canyon and not great for building or building a large place, but it was a very important place. And so it became a hub and a centre for a, for a community and a very diverse community too. You had a, a Chinese history museum there, there were a Buddhist monastery in the hills just above it. It was an integrated community between, First Nation communities. There was large, a significant First Nation population and the re still is and then there was the town side itself, which provided services to a region of a couple thousand people, and then as well as the couple hundred people who live, lived in the, the town side itself.

Jordan Heath Rawlings It’s an incredible history that I admittedly as somebody from Ontario had no idea about until reading some of your work and especially a really detailed feature, you’ve written on the town itself. I think most of Canada, myself included, obviously knows Lytton BC for one thing. You alluded to it a little bit what happened in 2021. This is why we’re using past tense and present tense and shuffling between them I guess.

Tyler Olsen The fire in 2021 destroyed the entire village site aside from two or three buildings. And as I’ve mentioned, the village site itself was not huge, but a couple hundred people lived there and it provided services for a huge, very rural but significant region. So that fire that ripped through there, people can remember the images. They know it, maybe they’ve heard of it. It’s, it’s hard to kind of sum up though what it, like, just, just the, the significance of it because we’ve had fires that go through towns before, unfortunately. We’ve had…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right. But what’s different about this one?

Tyler Olsen Right. And, and what’s different about this one is that this fire didn’t just go through a portion of town, or it didn’t just go, into a, a large neighbourhood and devastate that area. It knocked out an entire village. And it went through the village core and ripped its guts out essentially. You had banks there, you had the grocery stores, it destroyed. You had the fire department. It destroyed in the police department. It destroyed the village, the village hall, and it destroyed the place where the village stored their backup records. It’s so, Every little piece, nearly every little piece of infrastructure in the village itself was destroyed. And because of that, the fires effects have had a long and lasting and very damaging impact, both on, on the village, which it was, which it was always going to have, but on its ability and government’s ability to rebuild it

Jordan Heath Rawlings In the days after the fire. And I remember that fire, as I mentioned, the way you described it, there are photos of just, you know, nothing there where a town used to be. And it’s, it’s different from so many fire images we see where, you know, it’s touched a few houses and hasn’t touched others. In the days after the disaster, what did the government say about rebuilding? What kind of plans were made for this community? I have to admit, from out here, I assumed that it would never be rebuilt. That’s not what was supposed to happen.

Tyler Olsen No. And in the days after, there was talk about rebuilding it for a new century, for a new time. When there’s increased likelihood and risk of natural disasters, there’s good reason why you would want to and need to rebuild Lytton. Lytton’s in a remote area and now that there’s a new highway that runs called the Coquihalla that runs between the coast and the interior, it’s now more or less off the beaten track, but it still provides. Or still provided, services for a large number of people. And if you value and think that it’s important to not rip those services away from those people, you need to show an effort in rebuilding. Even more than that is if you think that the people or the scale and the size of the Indigenous communities in the area too have grown up. Just as the other people in the area have built around these services that were provided in the village of Lytton. Rebuilding the Village of Lytton serves them noticed that and would serve notice that we can rebuild and we can live in these communities even as climate change and other manmade forces makes them more likely.

Jordan Heath Rawlings In the weeks after the fire, before we get to the rebuilding efforts, what happened to the people of Lytton and of the surrounding community, and I guess this is key, how was their experience different from say the victims of the floods or other fires that we typically talk about as disasters and unfortunately your area has seen a lot of them.

Tyler Olsen Mm-hmm. Yeah. So immediately after the fire residents fled north to Lillooet, they fled to the east to Kamloops, and they fled to the south to the Fraser Valley and the community of Chilliwack and Abbotsford. And there they stayed in emergency accommodations for, I would like to say a couple months, but frankly, some people were there for more than a year in, in, in the various places. The challenges were aggravated, in part because Lytton was the first fire of that 2021 fire season or the first, the first notable severely damaging fire, but it was not the last one there was the White Rock lake fire that burned large number of, of homes in the Okanagan. And there were, there were, there were multiple fires all over the province that summer. So by the time the the summer ended, you had people in, say the Fraser Valley who were evacuated from Lytton join sometimes in hotels and other places by evacuates from other fires. Now the, the recovery from those other fires has been quicker because you’ve had the local supports needed to create the framework needed to rebuild communities and rebuild neighbourhoods. In Lytton that all went away when the, when the village was burned. British Columbia’s system for rebuilding communities really stresses the local voice in putting the rebuilding efforts in the hands of the local communities and local municipalities. And in Lytton none of that existed and it really still, maybe hasn’t been fully appreciated the, the damage that that caused, the infrastructure and the human infrastructure that was required and was available in other communities and has been available in past fires, just was no longer there in Lytton because you had a community where even the mayor and the counsellors had lost their homes. And if you can imagine trying to, or if you can imagine being a counsellor or a mayor elected to a, to run a very small village and then lose your home and then have it be your job to rebuild not just your home, but your entire community. And the, the scale of that task and the scale of those efforts and to have to do something that essentially hasn’t been done before in British Columbia was just out of potentially and probably impossible for any, any people in that position.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So after two years then, or almost two years, how has the rebuild been going? I understand all the challenges that you’ve just outlined, and in fact, it’s almost like it has never been done before. What has happened? What’s on the ground there now?

Tyler Olsen I drove through Lytton and I think first when they opened it up a couple months after the fire, and at that point there were burned out shows of buildings everywhere. There were burned out wreckages of cars, there was fire debris everywhere, and there was just two or three buildings standing. And what has changed since then is that the debris has gone, the burned out wreckage has gone and the cars have gone, but only in the last couple months have you seen even modular housing, not housing, modular buildings being erected. And we’re talking two or three of them. It’s essentially, and, and as the mayor told me, a wasteland, and this was something that she told me in February of 2023. And so as the months have passed, a couple more modular buildings have sprung up, but essentially the last two years has been spent cleaning up the sites, removing and testing the soil for contaminants, testing the ground for archeological items of significance and, and waiting. There’s been a lot of waiting. On the parts of those who would like to see faster progress.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why is it taking so long? Doesn’t the British Columbia government have like a blueprint specifically for rebuilding after disasters? I understand the scope of this is larger, but we’re still replacing homes and buildings.

Tyler Olsen The BC government has a blueprint for helping communities rebuild themselves, essentially is the issue. And that blueprint doesn’t apply in Lytton because the village itself doesn’t, hasn’t had the capacity. It’s lost staff and the people who’ve come in to replace those staff members have themselves had to leave. And when we’re talking about staff, we’re talking about staff in the, in the single digits often. Because this is, again, a community of a couple hundred people. It doesn’t have a huge budget. They’ve brought in people and consultants from outside, and thankfully remote work has allowed people to not have to live on the ground to help out. But the stresses and the challenges have made the human resources part of it immensely difficult. You’ve had the changing way in which communities process or interact with areas of historical significance has also really changed over the past decade even, is what I’ve heard. And so a decade or two decades ago, you would have seen maybe the soil quickly tested and building starts to go up right away. But we have, there are rules now in which if, archeological significance is found on a site or belief to be on the site. But because we knew there had been communities living on and by we, I’m speaking very broadly, but because it was known, there had been communities living on the site for thousands of years, it was known right away that there could be when all of this dirt and contaminated debris was pulled outta the soil pieces of lives, that were lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, right. These archeological fragments of life. And so they budgeted it at the time, I think $1 million to check the soil for these pieces and where possible to go through the permitting process, which is quiet created by the province and quite rigorous. What they found were 95 different pieces because this was a place that had been lived on for thousands of years. And so that process itself, which people didn’t at the time maybe fully realize, or at least the government didn’t fully realize would be as extensive as it has, has, has slowed the process, as has the removal of contaminants and really has, has a lack of urgency and understanding I think on the parts of the people with the purse strings and the people who maybe aren’t as connected to this process that this is dragging. And, and there are just little, little things that add up over time and, and each complicate one another and have resulted in this being such a drawn up process.

Jordan Heath Rawlings While this is going on, what are the residents of the town doing? You mentioned some of them spent almost a year in emergency housing. Where are they now? Are they waiting for their town to be rebuilt? Are they just going elsewhere? So some of the residents spent more than a year and I haven’t checked, but they may still be in, in emergency housing at this moment many people have moved on. Some people have taken their insurance proceeds and attempted to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Some sadly have passed away in the time that the rebuilding process hasn’t progressed. It’s like any community in where every little, every person has a slightly different, and will have a slightly different life and future that they see for themselves, and for some they can wait, and for many they can’t.

Tyler Olsen So the people of Lytton have expressed frustration with the fact that. At the start of this process, we heard government talking about wanting to rebuild Lytton in as a model community to be energy efficient and resilient in the face of climate change. And while they didn’t object to that, They haven’t objected specifically to that on mass. What has been evident is that, their need for a level of urgency and speed to return them to their homes hasn’t, or wasn’t, at least, until fairly recently, maybe communicated, or at least seemed to be a priority on the parts of government and those in charge of laying the framework for the rebuilding of Lytton. There was an election in the fall of 2021 and a new council and mayor were elected who stressed the need to, rebuild and speed the rebuilding process up as up as much as possible. But even those people have found challenging and will find it challenging because many of the challenges and problems that, have delayed. The rebuilding of Lytton still exists. They still need to be able to retain and recruit staff to create the the means for which people can rebuild their lives and rebuild their homes. They still need government to deliver funding when it’s promised and before it runs out. They still need the people themselves to see value and see a future in this community that has now been gone for two years, but had such a vibrant and lively sense about it, and which could still have one. I think Lytton, as we’ve said, has a, has a long history and there’s no reason that it can’t prosper in the 21st century and that it can’t be a place along at the confluence of those two rivers that remains a junction and a place where people learn about the past and the people see the amazing beauty of the area. But it needs the people to believe in that themselves so that it can be rebuilt, and so that you have that energy that can, that can get the community back on its feet.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Last question. What could be done to make this go faster? You mentioned, things may be changing now, may eventually be speeding up. Now that the government has seen that this is a town without the resources to rebuild itself, how can it step in and do more?

Tyler Olsen These problems that are evident now, were evident a year ago we heard the complaints and right, we could see the progress on the ground and see that there wasn’t much progress. The question is a bit late for Lytton, it seems. Lytton is on its own timeline and it will be going on its own timeline and hopefully we’ll see rebuilding start by the end of this year. And absent having somebody, a designated person who’s in charge of cutting all the red tape that, has held up the, the rebuilding. There may not be a ton that the province can do at this point, but what the province can do is it can look at what’s gone on here and consider whether any of the processes have been changed. If a fire happens later this year and does something terrible to another small, isolated community in this province. And what other places in Canada can Canada can do is the same, is to look at their processes and figure out if those processes will work, not just for fires that damage a neighbourhood or eat around the fringe of a community. But if a fire or another natural disaster removes the entire infrastructure and the entire capacity of that community or those communities to function. We can look around our regions and our provinces and see communities that are highly at risk of natural disasters and, and increasingly at risk of events because of climate change. And we can wonder what will happen and our processes and does our government have the capacity to take those places that aren’t going to be able to rebuild themselves and really help them to the degree that they’ll need if and when something does happen. We also have to, I think, remember that these aren’t just small town questions. These are questions about what we do in the case of an earthquake or a major ice storm. People have asked, why would you rebuild Lytton, it’s in a place that could be susceptible to a future wildfire? But you have most people in BC live in places that are highly susceptible to a variety of natural events. You have earthquakes, the threat of earthquakes, you have the threat of tsunamis, you have the threat of wildfires and floods and, and these aren’t unique to Lytton. And so answering these questions is important not just for the people of Lytton, but for the people of all of British Columbia and probably all of Canada.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Tyler, thanks so much for this and thanks for the work you’re doing out there.

Tyler Olsen Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Tyler Olsen, editor and reporter at the Fraser Valley Current. That was The Big Story. For more, including our initial reporting from Lytton in 2021. You can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can always talk to us if you want to, by following on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn. By emailing us using hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. Or by picking up the phone 416-935-5935 and leaving a message after the beep, it’s been years since I’ve used that phrase. You can find The Big Story in every podcast player, and as you should know by now, you can ask for it on a smart speaker by saying play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.