‘It looked like a movie down in Mexico. Everything was yellow’

Santiago is a 21-year-old university student from Colombia. He’s the son of two retired police officers, and loves cheering for the Colombian national soccer team. When he was 15, Santiago lived in Virginia while his mother completed her master’s in international global security and military strategy, where he learned to speak English. Santiago came to Kamloops in 2021 for a bachelor of communication and digital journalism at Thompson Rivers University, because he wanted to be a journalist since he was seven or eight years old. In 2023, he was working as a server at Hacienda Cielito Lindo and at a food truck that sells pizza when the smoke from the province’s fires flooded Kamloops.

The first thing I remember is the amount of smoke in town. It was crazy how we could change from one day that was super blue, and then all this smoke. One week was bad, and the next week was good. There was like a month or two where two weeks of that month, it was like they were doing a fire pit all over town, just burning wood everywhere in Kamloops. 

It was so, so smoky and everything was dirty. It looked like a movie down in Mexico. Everything was yellow. It was like we were living in sand. I have a condition in my eyes. They are a little sensitive. I remember my eyes were irritated from that smoke, and the smell was just not normal. I remember sometimes feeling dizzy, from all this smoke I was smelling. 

Most of the time I was working and then I just went home. I’m pretty sure there were days that I would have wanted to go to the beach and have a great day, or go out to a lake or something. But because of the smoke, I was just not comfortable or secure to go out. My mind was feeling something really bad, like anxiety maybe. I think the uncertainty made me feel concerned. Maybe you have to go away? Maybe you have to leave Kamloops, pack your stuff and go somewhere else because it’s getting even worse? So I think that was the main feeling I was going through. 

I spoke with my mother, and I told her, “Yes, this is happening. I’ve read that there are not enough firefighters to handle the situation.” People from Kamloops say that it’s unlikely to get actual wildfires in town. It relieves me, but I’m still concerned that something might happen. I see the stories of people who lose houses, even people who lose families because of the wildfires. In my hometown, in Colombia, I’ve never lived through something like this before. Having a backpack ready to go somewhere else because of a fire or an evacuation, it’s new.

You see the smoke coming from Logan Lake or Lac Le Jeune, but you don’t fully understand what’s going on. You start reading the news. Smoke got to Chicago, to New York, and it’s affecting more than seven million people. You realize that this is not just something from the small town of Kamloops, but it’s everywhere. Now, every time March or April approaches, I start looking on the Internet about how it’s going to be, trying to inform myself as much as I can.

I remember I read an article from CBC where they said wildfires are just going to be the regular thing now here in Canada. This is just something that is going to keep happening. There’s no way back, with all the contamination and bad activities that we have against our own place of living. I just think that we have to get used to this, whether we like it or not. We have to be prepared by having more firefighters, by maybe having a force that might not just be police officers but could also work against wildfires. 

I used to think that it was something that the regular population could control by recycling, having vehicles that don’t consume much gasoline and all these things. Now I see we might do all these things to make a difference personally, but there’s always going to be these big corporations that don’t want to. They don’t want to change their way of putting money first. I feel like the ball is in their field and they have to take that step and start thinking more about the ecosystem.

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.