A resident from British Columbia’s Cariboo region says there’s nothing left around her property on Six Mile Lake other than her burnt-out chimney stack and her neighbour’s propane tank.
Carol Senzeni says she got the news by watching the neighbour’s video posted to Facebook, days after she escaped from the home on Friday with her two cats and anything she could throw in her vehicle.
Senzeni, whose home is about 10 kilometres away from the village of Clinton, says she watched the flames as they neared her home, sending large plumes of smoke into the sky.
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Senzeni, who has found refuge north at 108 Mile Ranch, says the experience was “very daunting” and “very scary.”
She says her cats are homesick, and they’ve been “keeping me up at night crying.”
Officials with the Village of Clinton have said they would be calling residents who lost buildings on their properties from the Pear Lake wildfire, which has grown to about 670 square kilometres.
Just under 50 of 130 wildfires burning in B.C. are out of control, and the weather in the central Interior is expected to return to hot and dry conditions through the August long weekend.
Senzeni says many people in her neighbourhood went through trauma when they were evacuated during the Elephant Hill wildfire in 2017, which threatened numerous communities across the Interior as it grew to more than 191 square kilometres.
“This wave of wildfires that has come through Clinton and is moving northward and onward into other areas in the north, it’s rekindling old trauma, but also with new dangers,” she says.
Senzeni says the danger isn’t over yet and people in the village have been supporting each other during this difficult time.
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