The Okanagan town draws visitors to its lake beaches and vineyards through the warm months, and June through September is when its businesses earn enough money to see them through the winter
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PENTICTON — The first sign of trouble for Aviana Ferlizza, the manager of Zios family restaurant in Summerland, was a phone call to cancel a reservation.
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It was around 5:45 p.m. on the Friday the Bald Range wildfire broke out, and a customer from Faulder was calling to say they wouldn’t make it — there was a plume of smoke out their way. Ferlizza checked online and thought it looked small. Then she walked to the front of the restaurant and looked up.
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“I was like, ‘Oh, shit, we’re in big trouble right now,’” she said.
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Sunrise
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They kept serving anyway. The restaurant was nearly sold out, and the staff carried on as the sky turned orange and ash began drifting onto the patio where people were still eating.
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Aviana’s mother, Shannon Ferlizza, who owns Zios, compared it to a scene from a movie.
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“The piano player kept playing, glasses were tinkling,” Shannon said. “If you remember the Titanic, where that was all going on as the ship was sinking — that’s how we felt.”
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The order to leave came at 1 a.m., the scariest stretch of the night, she said — the town’s emergency air horns sounding as the family loaded the cars, ash everywhere, chunks of smouldering wood dropping into yards.
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The Ferlizza family got out, though they had to leave their pig behind on the farm. The family has been in Penticton ever since, waiting, like everyone else.
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For the restaurants and cafés of Summerland, summer is the whole year. The Okanagan town draws visitors to its lake beaches and vineyards through the warm months, and June through September is when its businesses earn enough money to see them through the winter. This year the fire emptied the town at the peak of the season, sending more than 12,000 people out under evacuation orders.
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“These are the months where we make the money that gets us going for the rest of the year,” Shannon said. “They’re by far our biggest months.”
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The fire that pushed them out started that Friday afternoon west of Summerland and grew explosively. The latest update Wednesday had the fire mapped at more than 184 square kilometres, up from 156 square kilometres the day before, still burning out of control.
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Premier David Eby said during a news conference that this kind of rapid fire activity might be “our new normal” in B.C. He reassured residents out of their homes that they will get help, noting they may have to stay away for a while yet.
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B.C.’s minister of emergency management, Kelly Greene, said a large number of first responders are travelling through the evacuated areas doing damage assessments and providing security for the empty homes.
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Greene said it is too early to say when residents can check on their homes themselves, but that officials are making direct contact with anyone who has lost property to the blaze.
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There are 16 people in the house Ferlizzas are staying in now, with two trailers out front to take the overflow.
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The house belongs to Shannon’s relatives, who have gone to Vancouver to free it up; the two other families staying there are Zios staff and their families, whom the Ferlizzas took in after they’d been stranded in a Walmart parking lot.
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“We kind of try to split up during the day, so we don’t kill each other,” Shannon said jokingly.
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Zios itself came through the fire fine. Shannon has been watching it on the security cameras — 150 seats, 45 staff, open since 1998, still standing in a town no one can enter.
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All her employees are out of work, and most of them can’t yet get employment insurance.
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“We can’t even offer EI, because we can’t get them the paperwork,” she said. “Everything’s in Summerland.”
