‘Everyone thought they were going to die and felt like they were stuck’

Diego is a fourth-year journalism student who has lived in Kamloops for just short of twenty years. Inspired by the late chef Anthony Bourdain, who travelled the world documenting other cultures through food, Diego wants to spend the rest of his life travelling the world, hearing other people’s stories and writing about them. Diego also uses film photography to express himself, having worked with the medium for the past seven or eight years. At the time of the 2021 Juniper Ridge fire, Diego was living with a friend in an apartment in Sahali and working long hours at the Kamloops Airport.

It was a pretty dry summer. It was one of those summers where you could feel exactly how dry it was in the air. It was quite smoky. It was thick, strong, and permeated everything. The smoke didn’t really move around, it just sat in the valley for months. At the time, I was working at the Kamloops Airport so I was outside quite a bit. The airport’s tarmac, pavement, concrete, it all gets really hot. Generally, on clear days, it’s about twenty degrees hotter than the air temperature because it sits in the sun all day. It gets pretty draining and I was always tired and a little bit out of it.

I kind of just accepted that between work, the weather, and the smoke, that it was not a summer for me to enjoy. Every day was just another day. Every month was another month. We were still in lockdown so everyone was just waiting for something to happen. That’s how I ended up sitting on my deck watching the storm at the apartment in Sahali that I shared with my friend. 

It was Canada Day, 2021. I got off work at about 2:30 p.m. and was looking forward to relaxing for the rest of the day. It started raining so I decided to sit and watch the rain, watch the lightning, just listen to it. I grew up in Vancouver and rain can be grounding and helpful in centering yourself. Kind of like getting in sync with the universe. 

I remember that the rain was loud. Big, heavy raindrops were just battering everything they could possibly reach. I sat out there watching it for about an hour before the lightning started getting quite bad and frequent. Just a barrage of lightning every ten to fifteen seconds, constantly beating down.

There was a bit of a gap where there was almost no lightning strikes at all, and then there was one really big one. Something about it clicked within my head. It’s like my intuition knew exactly where that lightning hit. 

The first thing I did was call my brother to see if they had seen it. He told me that it struck thirty or fourty metres from our backyard, and everything around it caught fire immediately. We live right at the bottom of the neighbourhood, right against a big parkland, which gets quite dry. The real desert part of the desert.

My brother and my mom were packing up our stuff. 

My dad went out and set up a bunch of sprinklers to make sure everything was wet while they waited for the fire department to show up.

Everybody in the neighbourhood saw the fire. The fire was called in to emergency services quickly. I didn’t expect it to get as bad as it did, even though it was dry, and things were bound to spread.  Everybody in our neighbourhood was told to evacuate with no warning or notice. Just leave. Everyone thought they were going to die and felt like they were stuck. 

I immediately decided to have my family come to my apartment  based on the phone call with my mom and brother. There didn’t seem to be any better option at that point as they would’ve been sitting in a parking lot with everyone else from the neighbourhood waiting to hear about the state of the fire and when they’d be able to return.

After ending the phone call with my brother, I called my roommate and let him know the whole Juniper Ridge neighbourhood was being evacuated. My parents, my brother, our cat, and all of our stuff were going to be there when he got home from work. They were going to stay with me until they were allowed to go back. 

There was next-to-nothing about the fire on the news or social media until my family arrived at my apartment. The fire was hanging over everyone’s heads, creating an unnerving state of unknowing which was definitely difficult. 

My family finally got to my apartment around seven or eight that night. We only have one road in and one road out of Juniper so the highway was completely congested and it took about an hour, or an hour and a half, for them to arrive. It was a stressful night for me as I had worked overtime that day and was supposed to be working again the next morning at 4:45 a.m. No one slept. We stayed up anxiously waiting for any updates. My family ended up staying with me for about seven hours before they were allowed to return home, at about 3 a.m. the next morning. 

I live in that Juniper Ridge house again now. It definitely changed my perspective on how to handle situations like that. We’re ready to go and always prepared at the beginning of the summer just in case it happens again. We pack not just a go-bag with things we’d actually need, but stuff that we actually want to make sure we’re keeping. The things that I care about the most that are valuable in a lot of different ways, but mostly valuable to me. My books, comic books, my laptop, cameras, all of my film negatives, my extra equipment if I have room for it, clothes. Probably not all the things I’d need, but things that I wouldn’t be happy if I lost. That was definitely something we changed. 

I think preparing helps me feel ready to deal with anything that would come. But the possibility of it happening doesn’t give me good feelings. It definitely doesn’t feel good to prepare in the anticipation of something that you don’t know whether or not it’ll happen.

I don’t think I can see the fires in any positive way. At this point, it’s just part of the routine in Kamloops. I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon.

You can’t stop a wildfire by yourself. I hope people become more aware of how quickly fires can become a threat, how fast they move, and how quickly they’ll destroy everything in their path. I think it’s really important that people know how to handle those situations when they come. Being prepared, knowing where to report a fire properly, making sure you’re aware of the things that cause fires so you’re not contributing to it. Just in case. 

I think there’s a lot that could be done about climate change that would make massive differences. Tangible efforts really need to be made. Every person has a carbon footprint. Every person should be doing their part, making sure we don’t destroy our planet. 

Every time I meet somebody who feels the same way as I do, or even as strongly as I do, it is really encouraging that things might start changing. As for whether or not things will start changing anytime soon, who knows.

This story is a part of a series created by Thompson Rivers University students and led by instructor Jennifer Chrumka as part of the Climate Disaster Project.