Air Line Pilot, October 2003, p. 28
By Capt. Dean Newhouse (Kelowna Flightcraft)

The next day was anything but usual. I awoke and started my routine—grab a coffee; go for a jog around the parliament buildings; dinner; then get ready for work. A power failure interrupted my daily program. Probably be back on in a minute, I thought to myself. Traffic became gridlocked in minutes. Nobody seemed to know what happened. My cell phone worked, so I phoned our Flight Operations Department in Kelowna, which informed me that the electric power grid had failed and that power was out on the whole eastern seaboard. I phoned back in an hour and was told that we were going to try to operate that night and to go out to the airport at the normal time. I called back and notified them that I had a real situation on my hands. My electric razor and clothes iron were about as good to me then as they would have been for Tom Hanks on that island. My tone was serious. Any interruption of the routine is cause for stress. Our dispatchers noted my problem without mentioning the fact that a wildfire was then screaming toward them.

When we flew over the fire on Friday morning at 3 a.m. PST, we could not believe the size of it. The monster had by then consumed thousands of hectares and was getting close to Kelowna. The first officer stared at the fire out the right side, but spotting fires was not a game this time. He lives in Kelowna and was now trying to pinpoint his home through the smoke. As we flew out on Friday evening, a gigantic plume of smoke was towering over 30,000 feet high and could be seen for 200 miles. I said to my crew, "This is getting serious." I could tell by their facial expressions that they already knew that.

After the weekend in Ottawa, I headed back to Vancouver on Monday night. Not much to see that night —just smoke and lots of it. Throughout the week, we watched the monster grow in size. The fire had spread exponentially overnight and was three times the size it had been 24 hours before. We pulled out our calculators and converted hectares to acres and multiplied by three repeatedly to conclude that, at the current rate, the whole province would be consumed in 8 days. We must have made a mistake. We checked our calculations, and all concurred that we had figured correctly. I thought it was time to start calling friends in the Okanagan.

"How’s everything going?" I’d ask. The response was very serious. "We’re O.K., but I don’t have time to talk. We’re on one-hour evacuation notice, and I’ve got to pack." Their state of emergency was much more grave than my power failure experience had been, and I had vividly described that to them on my cell phone just days before.

I felt very helpless flying over the valley that night. Our company radio frequency was buzzing with pilots updating news from the front and making plans for their families. People had lost their homes, and no relief was in sight.

On Friday, the fire, which was consuming everything in sight, was now consuming my thoughts. This was the most serious disaster I had ever seen in my life, and it was greatly affecting me because I knew people in the war zone. I had to phone again to satisfy my selfish desire for current news. My friends weren’t answering their phones. Some of the lines were out of service. The ones I got through to said, "I’m sorry, I don’t have time to talk on the phone."

I sent e-mails and soon got a reply. It was much worse than I could imagine: "It’s been a week from hell, Dean—literally. It went right behind our property and just missed us, but it nailed Don’s house (his whole street is gone), as well as Al’s house, and Ken’s properties are toast. I stayed to the end with my dad hosing everything down, and we ended up literally running for our vehicles as an unreal funnel of wind and smoke nailed us. I thought we were goners. It was very scary, and we thought we’d lost the whole farm. It was bad. The next day, though, I was totally shocked to see our farm from the other side of the lake. Don was not so lucky. We owe a lot to the Kelowna firefighters, and the entire community has pulled together through this. See you on the line."

I haven’t phoned my friends who lost their homes because I don’t know what to say. I sent e-mails until it dawned on me that they don’t have computers anymore. They don’t have clothes, furniture, food, or a roof over their heads. The whole thing seems surreal. It doesn’t matter why it happened or what’s to blame. The task at hand is to rebuild and be thankful, because as in all disasters, it could have been worse, which is easy to say looking down from 33,000 feet. People lost everything. The pictures we’ve only seen of the firestorms will be etched into their minds forever. The healing process begins.

Mother Nature proves once again that it is the most powerful force on Earth. The swath of destruction is massive. Everything in the way gets put back into the ground only to reemerge as new growth. In the big picture, all that happens in nanoseconds, but for mortals, it takes years. It either destroys us or makes us stronger. By press time, the fires had burned far more than 50,000 acres and destroyed 244 homes. If you wonder what hell looks like, just ask anyone who was there. The emotion of people whose lives have been changed forever cannot be communicated, and helplessly looking down at the monster from my office in the sky is something I’ll never forget for as long as I live.