 Thank you for joining us on such short notice. My name is Bowen Ma, Minister of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness. Today, I'm joined by Bruce Ralston, Minister of Forests. I'm honored to be speaking to you today from the territories of the Musqueam Squamish and Slavery to the Peoples. Like many people throughout the province, I was deeply horrified to witness the distressing images emerging from West Kelowna late last evening. Last night and into this morning, the McDougal Creek wildfire traveled towards the city, threatening thousands of people. Let me begin by saying that I know that this is a very challenging situation for everyone in that area. My heart is with you. Our government is deploying every resource available to keep people safe and protect the community. Myself, Minister Ralston and other ministers are working very closely with Premier Evie to make sure every resource is available to keep people safe. The past 24 hours have been very incredibly, the past 24 hours have been incredibly challenging for the people across the province. The BC Wildfire Service has done heroic work to keep people safe, not only in Kelowna, but in communities throughout the province. Wildfires are currently top priorities for the province. I must stress that all areas of the province are facing increased risks due to the current weather forecast and extreme drought. We are working closely with the Lytton First Nation to ensure the safety of their members and surrounding areas. And I'd like to acknowledge the heroic bravery of BC Wildfire Service personnel, their contractors, local fire departments and other emergency personnel. They've all been heroic over the last 24 hours. We are still faced with great challenges and I'm inspired by the dedication, professionalism and empathy that our entire team and everyone supporting them and all of the public have displayed. I know for many people living in affected areas, it has been a long 24 hours. However, the situation is still evolving. By taking the steps that you need to take to be prepared by following evacuation orders and alerts, you are doing everything you can to help protect your community. Currently, there are more than 4,500 people under evacuation order and more than 23,500 people under evacuation alert across the province. If you are placed under an evacuation order, you must leave the area immediately. Please be prepared, have an emergency plan and grab and go kit ready for you, your family and your pets. Your First Nation or local authority will provide information on evacuation routes and evacuation reception centers where you can access emergency support services. I'll now turn it over to Minister Ralston for an update as well. Thanks very much, Minister Ma. I too also want to acknowledge the tremendous efforts of our first responders. Their work has saved lives, homes and countless pieces of vital infrastructure throughout the province. We are indebted to them. As forecasted, we are facing extremely challenging fire situation. We remain in the midst of a strong weather pattern that is creating sustained winds and dry lightning. This has significant effects throughout the province. We had significant growth of existing fires and some new fires started overnight. With this new activity comes new evacuation alerts and orders. The impact will be felt throughout the weekend and we undoubtedly will see more fires and more extreme fire behavior in the coming days. I mentioned that we are in debt to our firefighters and their support teams and I've visited the Provincial Fire Center in Kamloops and there are the first line firefighters who I think we see as being most prominent. They're the air crews that fly the water bombers and the skimmers, but the support teams are also vital to this effort and they are working similarly. They're working long hours. And they are an important part of our part. Hey, a little bit of homage and give them their due and recognize the work that they are doing on our behalf. But the best way we can protect them is to make sure we give them the room they need to do their work. I want to say again, drones are a significant hazard to air crews fighting fires. It is illegal and irresponsible to fly them in fire areas. Along the same line, this is not the time to be boating on lakes where air tankers are refilling with water. Please keep boats away from areas where other aviation resources are operating. Minister Ma will have more to say about keeping the roads clear for our crews and potential evacuations. Before I turn this over to Cliff Chapman for his usual detailed report, I'd also like to again acknowledge the work in the North. The fires in the Northwest Territories have had significant impact there and in Northern British Columbia. Our thoughts are with those affected and they continue to have our stronger support. Thank you. Here's Cliff Chapman. Thank you very much Minister Ma and Minister Ralston. As stated, my name is Cliff Chapman. I'm the Director of Provincial Operations for BC Wildfire Service. I'm honored to join you today from the traditional territory of Tacumloops Disequipment at our Provincial Wildfire Coordination Center in Kamloops, BC. Before I get into a detailed report and it's a very fluid situation and I actually have a slide presentation to go through today, which I'll check when I put it up to make sure you can view it. I just wanna issue a very similar statement to those that have been impacted by the fires over the last 24 hours and really throughout the summer. It is stressful. It causes anxiety for you and your family. We recognize that as BC Wildfire Service and I assure you we are doing everything we can to try to protect your homes, protect your livelihoods and get you back home safe as quickly as possible. Yesterday's weather event was challenging as we knew it would be and obviously the impacts of that weather event are still being uncovered as we speak today. I'll speak to some of them through my presentation but again, our hearts go out to you. Our people out there are doing everything they can to try to support you getting home. I also wanna say thank you to the BC Wildfire Service staff which I am so proud of and have all been working significantly long hours working through the night, pulling people from homes, ensuring that people are going when they get asked under an evacuation order while also trying to manage the edge of some of these fires in extreme fire behavior. They are heroes as stated by Minister Ma and Minister Ralston in addition to the RCMP, local fire departments, local EOCs, First Nation EOCs, everybody stepped up in the last 12 hours to do everything that we can as one community, the community of British Columbia to try to do what we can in the face of this hazard. I can say from experience, I've been in BC Wildfire Service my entire career over 20 years and there's only a few dates that stick out for me as dates that will always be engraved in my head. Yesterday is one of those days. We knew the weather was coming, we knew it was gonna have a big impact on the fires and it did and now we're seeing the catastrophic impact that fires can have as they interface with communities, critical infrastructure and humans. So with that, just give me a moment and I will pull up my slide deck and give a bit of a detail, a more detailed rundown than we normally do on sort of what transpired yesterday and then I'll turn it back to Minister Ma. So just bear with me and I'll just look for confirmation that we can see it, not sharing. Okay, sorry about that. So just confirm we can see this in the room. Perfect, thank you, Minister. So as discussed yesterday, we knew that we were gonna see a province wide weather event sweep through British Columbia. As predicted, it started in the North and we did see some growth on our fires in the North, fires that have been relatively dormant for the last number of weeks. That's how strong the winds were yesterday as well as how dry the fuels continue to be across this province. As the cold front swept through the northern part of the province, the caribou portion of the province and finally into Kamloops, the Southeast and coastal fire centers, we really started to see the impacts of those winds on some of the large fires we have in the southern part of BC. This photo on this slide is Kukipi Creek Wildfire which is now in the Fraser Valley or Fraser Canyon. As you can see in this photo, just how high those flame lengths are from the aggressive fire behavior and fire weather that we experienced yesterday. Worth putting in perspective, those trees that you see in the foreground are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 to 200 foot trees. And you can see the flames are far exceeding that height in the background photo. So significant fire behavior yesterday on many of our fires. As we walk through what happened yesterday, sort of starting in Prince George in Northwest, I'm not gonna read everything, you can read the slides as we go. But what you can see here is that the dark red or the red outline is the original fire perimeter. Any of the red dots is where we saw growth yesterday. So this is a fire in the Vanderhoof complex that we've been on for the better part of the last six weeks. It has been very quiet and we've had very good suppression success on this fire until yesterday where our lines were challenged and our containment lines in some areas in particular on the south of this fire were lost. This fire continues to be a priority for BC even as it sits in the Van Jam Fire complex. Now as we move further south, and it is worth noting that there were also, there was also aggressive fire behavior on the fires that were in Tweedsmere Park, but I'm just gonna move down now to the Coo-Keepee Creek wildfire. Originally this fire was 16 kilometers northwest of Boston Bar. Yesterday we saw a significant wind event as we expected on this fire, pushing the fire across the valley out of the Nahat Lach drainage and into the Fraser Canyon drainage. It has impacted Highway One, it has crossed Highway One. As we know Highway One has been closed and it has also led to the expansion of evacuation alerts and orders up and down the Fraser Canyon, including the Nahat Lach area. As we move a little bit further up in that valley, we look at the Casper Creek complex. The Casper Creek complex is being run by an incident management team. We had one of our fires in that complex, Jump Carpenter Lake and Road 40, which is the one access egress route, main transportation corridor into Goldbridge and which is now under evacuation order. Including in this complex of three fires, we also see significant growth on the Stein fire in the Stein Valley Park, as well as the Gunn Lake area fire saw growth. We continue to see structure protection and structure protection personnel and apparatus deployed on these fires at large to do our best to protect the homes and cottages that are on these lakes. Crater Creek, which is in the Ashnola area in the far south of the province, this fire experienced, it wasn't smoked out like many of our other fires were yesterday morning, so it had clear skies. This fire, when it was hit by the winds fairly early in the day sustained 30 kilometer winds, we saw significant growth on this fire as well. And we continue to assess and work with the local First Nation and local governments in that area to assess the best strategy for this fire moving forward, knowing that it is going to start to bump into fires of past seasons, but ensuring that we can protect the community and the infrastructure in the area. As we move a little bit more into the central BC, right here we're looking at the Adams Lake complex and these are the two Adams Lake fires. You can see we did see some growth on the west side of Adams Lake as the fire started to sort of try to push down the slope there, not significant growth on the west, but on the east side of the Adams Lake fire, we see a lot of red dots on that side. I will tell you that we had a planned ignition off of the power line on that fire yesterday to try to secure the line and ultimately protect the North Shoe Schwab. That ignition has been largely successful to this point. We have had a couple of spot fires jump over our containment line, but we have crews and aircraft on those. And it will be our continued effort throughout the day to try to hold and secure that line where we did the planned ignition in the interest of protecting North Shoe Schwab and beyond. The Rossmore Lake fire just outside of Kamloops did not see as significant growth as our other fires. We did lose a containment line on the south end of that fire, and it is into some more heavier timbered fuels, but we are having some success with our suppression efforts on that fire late into last night and again this morning. So at this point in time, the Rossmore Lake fire did not see significant growth towards critical infrastructure homes and property. The Southeast Fire Center also experienced the winds. Fortunately, we didn't see the dry lightning show up until very late last night. And even then it looks like it may have come with a little bit of rain, which is very welcome. One fire that's, well, there's multiple fires in the Southeast Fire Center. The picture you see is Horstbeef Creek, which did see some growth in the Northeast corner yesterday. And it is challenging and will continue to challenge our guards for the next 24 hours. Smoke is very visible in and around Panorama. As of 5 p.m. yesterday, most of the growth on the fire was to the west in the low drainage, and crews are working in the Panorama area to clear brush and do everything we can to protect that resort. And finally, the Kelowna, what we're referring to as the McDougal Fire, West Kelowna area and Kelowna. A very, very stressful evening for everyone in that area. The community, our firefighters, the fire departments, the RCMP. As you can see, this fire had significant growth in the last 12 hours. This fire started, and when we originally discovered it, it quickly grew to 100 hectares. It is now north of 6,000 hectares. And we saw significant challenges with the fire interfacing with people's homes and structures and critical infrastructure. We're still assessing what that looks like as we try to continue to suppress this fire and understand what the impacts of it were through the night last night. The fire continued to display aggressive fire behavior from early in the day, all the way through until this morning, and it continues to display aggressive fire behavior this morning. We do have our air tanker resources flying in the area on this fire, as well as fires to the north and south of it that were started yesterday as well. It is worth noting this fire, we cannot confirm that it jumped Okanagan Lake at this point, or if it was a new fire, but there was an additional two fires in Kelowna proper that we have been working closely with the local fire department to try to suppress and protect structures on the Kelowna side of this fire. We have an incident management team deployed to this fire and we have resources there and more en route, including structure protection, heavy equipment, as well as our partnership with the local government and the municipal fire departments in the area as we set up a unified command to attack this fire on all fronts. I would like to take a quick moment to shout out and say thank you to the structure protection resources and team across the province in the last 24 hours. We have mobilized a significant amount of apparatus, human people, contract crews, municipal fire departments, and BC wildfire service staff to try to get structure protection to the structures that most critically needed. And so a big thank you to that team for moving equipment across the province, trying to protect people's homes and livelihoods. So with that, I'll end my presentation there. I just two quick things before I throw back to Minister Ma. Our priority right now is human and responder safety. As Minister Ma referenced and Minister Ralston referenced, we have had a couple incidents of people who have not adhered to the evacuation orders that are in place. And on a couple of different instances last night, we had to send RCMP fire department staff and our own staff back into evacuation order zones to try to get people out. That puts their lives at risk. Obviously the people who choose to stay's lives are at risk and has a significant toll on the mental and physical health of our staff and those that are there trying to get people out of the way of fires that are very unpredictable, moving extremely fast at rates that we rarely see in British Columbia. Again, I want to encourage everybody, now is not the time to ignore an evacuation order. We need you out of your homes. We need you out of the way so that we can focus on trying to protect those homes and trying to steer the fire away from critical infrastructure and property. I want to thank everyone in BC for your continued support of our staff on the ground, being welcoming to the work that they are doing, thanking them for the work that they are doing. You have no idea how much that means to the people that are out there working countless hours, trying to put an end to what has been an extremely challenging fire season. Thank you very much. And I will throw back to Minister Ma. Thank you so much, Cliff. As of this morning, more than 2,500 properties are on evacuation order and 4,800 properties are on evacuation alert due to the McDougal Creek wildfire. Evacuation orders and alerts are in effect for portions of Kelowna, West Kelowna, West Bank First Nation, late country and the central Okanagan West electoral area. Last night, emergency personnel executed a tactical evacuation and went door to door in areas threatened by the McDougal Creek wildfire to ensure the safety of people in the affected areas. I'm encouraging people that live in the regional district of central Okanagan, West Kelowna, Kelowna and West Bank First Nation to reach out to family and friends who may be able to provide shelter. If you live in a high-risk area in other parts of the province, I am also asking you to make those arrangements now as part of your emergency plan. We are in peak tourism season. There is limited availability at hotels and motels. By staying with family or friends, you're helping fellow evacuees who may not have that option and you are helping our emergency response teams on the ground. We do continue to assess capacity for group lodging to ensure people affected by wildfires have a safe place to stay and people may pre-register with emergency support services online using the evacuee registration and assistance tool at ESS.gov.bc.ca. Anyone in BC can pre-register for evacuee assistance now. Additionally, information on evacuation alerts and orders is amplified by the province through the Emergency InfoBC website. If your community is placed under an evacuation order, you must evacuate the area immediately. At this time, I'm asking British Columbians and tourists to avoid traveling to the central interior and southeast portions of the province if possible. The central and southeast are facing high risks of wildfires due to the developing situation. If you must travel, study the BC Wildfire Service Interactive Map and Emergency InfoBC.ca to learn about active evacuation alerts and orders. We all need to give BC Wildfire Service personnel the space that they need to keep us safe. As I said earlier, I know that for many people living in the affected areas, it has been a long 24 hours. However, the situation is still evolving. By taking the steps to be prepared by following evacuation orders and alerts, you are doing everything you can to help protect your community. We're hearing from local officials that for the most part, the evacuations in and around Kelowna were orderly and I want to thank everyone for following instructions of your local authority or First Nation. The province is working closely with local authorities and First Nations to determine the extent of the wildfire damage. And I know that it can be troubling to be away from your home, not knowing whether or not your property was damaged by wildfire. But I want to stress in the strongest possible terms that now is not the time to return to the evacuated areas to determine if your property has been damaged by this fire. This is still a dynamic and extremely dangerous situation. Please give space to our emergency management personnel and BC wildfire service professionals so that they can focus all of their attention on keeping people safe and protecting structures. Again, we want to stress how important it is for the public to follow evacuation alerts and orders. When an evacuation order is issued, it is not issued lightly. There is a limited amount of time that people have to escape their property before it is too late. And people who choose to ignore evacuation orders put themselves and emergency personnel at risk. In some cases, it may be too hazardous. In some cases, it may be too hazardous for BC wildfire service personnel to return to an evacuation area to rescue people who have refused to obey evacuation orders. So again, I want to thank everyone who has been doing the right thing and leaving when asked to leave. We now have some time for questions and in addition to myself, Minister Ralston and Cliff, we've got Ian Cummings, Senior Director of Ministry Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, Nicole Bonette, Fire Information Officer with the BC Wildfire Service. We have Katie Ward, Deputy Director Southern Interior Region of Highways and Regional Services Division of the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure as well as Crystal Riley, CEO of BC Hydro. As a reminder for media on the phone, please press star one to enter the queue. That's star one to ask a question. For media in the room, please line up the microphone provided and please make sure to provide your full name and outlet. Media will be limited to one question and one follow-up. We'll be starting on the phones today. Our first question is from Richard Sussman, Global News. Please go ahead. Richard, are you there? We will move on to the next person in the queue and we're gonna go to Rob Buffen, CTV Vancouver Island, please go ahead. Might be an issue on our end. That's not our end. All right, yeah. Now we're moving on to Gordon Oakstra, Vancouver Sun. Please go ahead, Gordon. Can you hear me? We can hear you. Yes, thank you. Okay, great. I'm just wondering if it's possible to give a little bit of information on the resources that are on the Kelowna Fire Complex right now and how much additional resources are being sent there. Thank you so much for that question. We'll go to Cliff Chapman, who is likely to have the latest information on that. For the question. Actually, we did ask our information officer, our communication officer from that incident management team on the fire to join us today. So I will ask Nicole Bonnet to please respond to this question. She'll have more up-to-date information than I will. Thanks, Cliff, if everybody can hear me all right. Yes, go ahead. Perfect, pardon me. So overnight last night, there was upwards of 80 structure protection personnel, BC Wildfire Service and RCMP. They worked all throughout the night, largely on the evacuation side of things, as well as following the fire front and trying to extinguish the fire as it came down towards home. So for structure protection and structure defense. Today, we've got additional BCWS resources out there. More structure protection resources will be rolling in throughout the day, as well as aircraft. So there's a number of helicopters assigned to the incident. I think we're looking at seven by sort of mid-afternoon here. And there have been some air tankers assigned to the incident as well. Some challenges as far as wind go with the skimmer group. So we'll be looking at the larger retardant planes for now. But the numbers are really hard to pin down just because it's so dynamic. And there's a lot of resources that are still coming in. And then on top of that, like Cliff touched on earlier, we do have myself and a partial incident management team that's here right now. And an additional half of that team will be rolling in this afternoon. So resources are still ramping up and being assigned as needed. Gordon, did you have a follow-up? I do. I'm just wondering maybe Cliff or someone else could maybe give me a little bit of characterization. What do you mean exactly by extreme fire behaviors? Yeah, I can speak to it in general terms for what we experienced across the province. And Nicole can speak to it from what she's been seeing and witnessing this morning in Kelowna and West Kelowna. I think that maybe the easiest way to describe this is that there were real concerns yesterday from people in Vancouver that there was a volcanic eruption in BC across the mountain range. And that was our fire in the Fraser Canyon that I spoke to sitting with a large pyrocumulus smoke column punching through the atmosphere. And so when we say extreme, it is fast moving fire. We're seeing runs. We saw runs yesterday in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 kilometers with the winds. We're expecting similar, if not stronger winds today, although it is a little bit lighter in temperature. As I showed in the presentation with that first picture, the flame heights on our fires are in excess to 400 to 500 feet. There is very little that response tactics can do with these winds and that type of fire behavior. And so when I say extreme, what it means is that they are moving faster than we can effectively put firefighting resources on them and obviously making their way towards critical infrastructure and communities. Nicole, maybe you could speak to what you've seen on West Kelowna. Yeah, so from yesterday morning, I believe it was the fire was burning rank four, rank five by mid-morning, which is normally the time of day where we would see some reduced fire behavior. Typically peak burning activity is in the afternoon when you reach the hottest, driest part of the day. But with the weather patterns we're seeing in the drought conditions that are out on the ground, we're not getting those recoveries or that reprieve, especially overnight. So last night, the fire remained quite active. Structure protection did a really great job working in and around the communities and critical infrastructure. But there were areas where the fire activity was just too substantial and roads were closed, access was blocked. And so we're still even seeing that transfer into this afternoon with gusting 30, 40 winds reported about an hour ago now. Not sure how that's translating out on site right now, but that's helping sort of increase that fire activity, pick fire activity back up to that rank four, rank five, you're gonna start to see an organized flame front in the trees. Trees will be candling and the fire activity is gonna move with that wind because the fuels are just so dry. So it's really driving the rate of spread and carrying those ember brands. Next question is going to go to, I'm sorry, we're having a lot of movement in the sequence today. So we're gonna go to Jordan Tucker, CBC radio. Please go ahead. Hi there. So can you hear me? Yes. Go ahead. Okay, I was wondering just how, like at what point will the province declares state of emergency or is it best that you guys already have the emergency powers in place to do what you need to do and don't need to do that? Yeah, thank you so much for that question. It's a question that we constantly assess in the Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness. Local states of emergency are in place in many places right across the province. This is what allows local governments to access the tools they need to issue alerts and orders, deploy resources if they need. We've had excellent cooperation with local governments. As Cliff had said earlier, we're already setting up unified command structures in different areas of the province to help fight these fires and support communities and people who are being evacuated. But as I said, we are constantly assessing whether we need additional tools that aren't available through existing legislation. So far we have the tools that we need but that can change very quickly and that is one of the reasons why we are gearing up to be able to go into a formal declaration on a provincial state of emergency if required and at that point we'll be dependent on emergency management experts basically identifying what tools we might need that aren't currently available. Jordan, did you have a follow up? I mean, what are the criteria I'm going to do? I think it's gonna get bad enough, but I mean, yeah, I'm just recalling like if you took emergency care, it was pretty cold a few years ago. Sorry, I actually didn't get that question. Jordan, I'll get you to repeat that, your line's a bit. It's a bit garbled. I'm just wondering at what point, like what are the criteria I'm going to see? Okay. Okay, I think that the question was about what the point at which point of declaration is made. And let me first off be very clear. This is an emergency situation. It is an emergency situation in many regions across the province. It is one of the reasons why the Provincial Emergency Coordination Center has been active at a level four state of readiness to support provincial and regional response activities for about a month now. The declaration of a state of provincial emergency, itself though, it is largely an administrative step that allows us to access specific tools that are available through that declaration that aren't available to us right now. But the tools that we need right now are available to us through the Wildfire Act. And the Wildfire Act allows us to spend whatever it takes to acquire resources, to deploy resources in order to fight wildfires. We're able to access other tools through the Emergency Program Act to support evacuees and communities that have to support evacuees and then support communities. We have tools available through the BC Wildfire Service as well as the Ministry of Transportation Infrastructure to close down highways if we require it. So a lot of the tools that we are actively using that we need in our response to wildfire and to support evacuees are already available and that we haven't had to execute a formal declaration on a state of provincial emergency yet means that our regularly available legislative tools are robust and that is a good thing because we see wildfires every summer. But if we get to the place where we need to access tools that are not available there, and that might be for instance, formal travel restrictions beyond what BC Wildfire Service and the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure can implement legally on their own. That is an example of where we might go, have to go to a state of provincial emergency. Our next question is for Director Reiser, Canadian Press, please go ahead. Senator, I didn't get, is there an estimate of how many people were ordered evacuated from West Kelowna yesterday? I did provide a number earlier, but it is a rapidly evolving situation. So I'm going to check in with Ian Cummings. I think you're on the line. Do you have the latest numbers on that? Yes, Minister, not specific to Kelowna, but estimated population under order, provincially, as a result of wildfire right now, it's just under 4,500 individuals. Derek, did you have a follow-up? Yeah, okay, thank you. I wanted to ask a quick chat, and again, if you could explain or relate how quickly this West Kelowna fire went from, I think it was 600 hectares to now 7,000 or more. Okay, I think we'll go to Nicole for Kelowna-specific questions there. Go ahead, Nicole. I seem to have lost my video, so apologies for that. I don't know how to get it back. But the winds yesterday that we saw in West Kelowna, they just really drove the fire activity and fire growth itself. Winds can really influence how the fire behaves with local topography, and so that played a big factor in combination with the existing drought conditions. The initial spread rates and just spread rate growth of the fire itself, they're so dry that the fire is moving quite rapidly. And when it picks up into that rank 3, 4, 5 fire behavior and you start to see those organized flame fronts, it starts creating its own weather and pulling in on itself and growing that way as well. So just really the weather conditions and the preexisting drought conditions have played a really big factor in how this fire has grown. Our next question today is for Tyler Olson, Fraser Valley Current. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks. You have a highly representative there. To keep the quick fire seem to have overrun the area where work is being done to repair landslide damage on Jackass Mountain. Do you have any information on how the situation with traffic backups and traffic here, there was a result? Thank you so much for that question. We do have someone from the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure who may be able to provide some information about how that wildfire is impacting that work. Katie? We are able to close the highway last night with minimal damage to the site. The crews were taken on our construction site and right at this point we have no news that... Sorry, Katie. Katie, you're quite garbled. Maybe for the sake of answering the question, if you turn off your video feed, we might at least get some good audio out of you. Let's try that. Okay, is that better? Try turning off your incoming video feed as well. Sorry about that. Get as much bandwidth to your audio as possible. We might have to move on. If not, Katie, do you want to try one more time? Okay, how about now? It is a bit better. Let's give it a shot and if that doesn't work, maybe we'll get you to call in and we'll answer Tyler's question a little bit later when you're back on. Let's give it a shot. Okay, the crews in the construction site remain safe. We were able to clear traffic from the area with our closure points last night and it remains an active situation in there so we are working closely with the local authorities and we see what liar service to assess the highway. Okay, thank you so much for that. Tyler, it is a very dynamic and evolving situation that is actively underway. We may not know the full extent of the impacts until later on and so hopefully you heard Katie's response there but I know that it's also important that we'll continue to provide updates as they become available in the future. Tyler, did you have a follow-up? Yeah, thanks. And to one of your welfare representatives, you mentioned that fire near gun length, the Captain Creek fire video shows the severity of that early this morning. Do you have information on the scale of damage there and whether the nearby community of Gold Bridge was affected? I'll go over to Cliff Chapman for that one I believe. Thanks for the question. Yeah, as I said when I was rolling through the slide presentation there was significant growth on that fire and the surrounding fires around it. We have not been able to confirm whether or not or how many structures were impacted but we have had word that it does appear that there were structures impacted with the growth last night. In terms of Gold Bridge proper, the primary concern as of last night and I will confirm that that hasn't changed this morning was access and egress with road 40 being compromised due to fire activity, not Gold Bridge being threatened itself at this point in time but obviously as Minister Ma just stated the situation is dynamic and that does not mean that Gold Bridge may not have the potential of a wildfire approaching that community but at this time the closure was or the evacuation order was more to do with the fact that the access and egress was going to be compromised due to fire behavior. For our next question we're going to, Lisa Yusta, City News, please go ahead. Hi there, I want you can talk about and if you could call on a specific, we're just seeing we know that UBC, Okanogan is being evacuated, just seeing how close that is to the airport, I'm wondering what kind of risk there is for massive infrastructure like that. Thank you so much for that question. Nicole are you still on the line there? I am, I don't know what's wrong with the video I'm trying a bunch of things and it doesn't seem to be bringing it back so that I'm still here. Evacuation of UBCO and the sort of Quailsgate area, that's a very new and evolving part of this incident since this meeting here has started. So still waiting to get more details on that as far as the airport goes, we already had a no-tam or notice to airmen in place to make sure that there was enough air space for the helicopters and fixed wing air tanker groups that were working in the area. So the traffic within the airport area itself has already been reduced quite greatly in the last 24 hours here. Did you have a follow-up Lisa? I'm just wondering if you can talk about the hospital, the preparations there, we know that there's a code orange alert to prepare. What are the expectations and I guess is the hope that that will never have to be added upon? So a little bit quiet there as well. A question was about hospitals. Could you please repeat that, Lisa? On at the Kelowna General and I'm just wondering what you think the likelihood is that people will need to be brought to the hospital. Is this standard that there is a code orange alert to prepare for casualty? I think I got that question. No, I'm not sure. Was that a question, but sorry, go ahead. Maybe we can try, I get you to try that one more time just really slowly and clearly please. Sure, just about the preparations at the hospital, is that standard or is there a real concern that people could be injured? Okay, thank you so much for that. I understand that the health authority has confirmed that it is at a code orange alert at this time preparing for code orange in cases it's referred to, but I think I'm going to pass it over to Ian who probably is able to speak to this a little bit more articulately than I'm able to. The information that we have at this time from Campbell's General is it's preparatory at this time should code orange be needed, meaning more casualties coming into the hospital than can be expected, but at this time that's preparatory in nature only. There's nothing to indicate that that could happen, but they're being prudent and prepping for it just in case. Back to you, Minister. And Ian to confirm you were referring to Kelowna General, I think you said Kamala. I think that's Kelowna General. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you. For our next question we're coming back to Richard's assessment global news please go ahead. Hi, I'm sorry about that we're actually on our way to Kelowna now and the self perception is not great. I'm trying to get a sense from Cliff around what the situation is looking like moving forward along that Highway 1 corridor, especially around the closure of Highway 1 and how in threat the powered railway lines were in in that area as well. So that may be Chris, but just a sense of what's about what we're looking for in that corridor. Go ahead, Cliff. I'll speak to the fire behavior and then I know we have BC Hydro on the line that can speak to hydro impacts, but in terms of fire behavior now that that fire has come out of the Nhat Lach Valley, which runs generally speaking west to east and into the Fraser Canyon, which runs north to south, we are expecting that fire to see significant and sustained winds. Anyone who's traveled that corridor realize knows that the winds in that valley are generally quite strong even when the rest of the province doesn't have windy days. And so we are anticipating significant wind in that valley very similar to what we saw yesterday and that fire has the potential to go north as well as to continue trending to the east towards into the more into the interior of the province. So as we've discussed, we are expecting winds to be sustained through the rest of today, this evening and into tomorrow. So it really is a critical 36 hours on all of our fires, but in particular the one that you've asked about, we are expecting that fire to continue to grow as we continue to try to evaluate evacuation orders and alerts, protect structures, and do what we can to steer that fire away from the communities that are in that valley, which as we all know have been devastated by fire over the last number of years. Maybe I'll see if someone from Hydro can speak to the Hydro impacts and then your question around the rail lines, it does sound like they have been impacted, I don't know the severity of that impact at this time. Yeah, it's Chris O'Reilly here from BC Hydro. So we have had impacts to our infrastructure across the province from a number of these fires. We really appreciate and are grateful for the work of BC Wildfire Services who are working to protect our structures. I think the major system is in, the major transmission lines are in reasonable shape now. We do have periodic outages from time to time due to smoke and that affects some of the equipment, the protection equipment, but generally our main backbone is intact and we're working to ensure the safety of our customers, of the first responders and our own crews who are active across the province around our infrastructure right now. Richard, did you have a follow-up? Richard, did you have a follow-up? I do and I'm sorry if this is a repeat, I got cut off while we were working through the Coca-Cola. In terms of evacuations, how prepared are we, if there are mass evacuations out of West Cologne and Cologne in addition to what we already have and what sort of resources are being sent to the area potentially to support the potential of more evacuations? Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness, our teams are regularly doing pre-planning work with communities to assess accommodations capacity and need. That being said, we are asking people who are in high-risk areas to reach out to their family and friends in other areas of the province to establish building potential opportunities for building with their family and friends so that we can focus our emergency support services in particular on the accommodation side on people who do not have that option. So there will be many evacuees who do have the option to go to family and friends asking them to make those arrangements now. It is an incredibly dynamic situation. We are establishing group lodging capacity right across the province. We currently have about 1500 group lodging facilities and then of course we're working with commercial accommodations, hotels and motels to working with them to accommodate evacuees as well. But we do need help from the public to have that emergency plan in place and to reach out to family, friends in other areas of the province as part of that. Ian, do you have any additional updates you can tell us right now? Yes, Minister. We too, as you mentioned, our Regional Operations Center in Kamloops has been working for quite some time. Now we do have group lodging sites set up with the Kamloops First Nations City of Kamloops as well as Salmon Arm in addition to some other locations in the northern part of the province should that be required as well as the Fraser Valley. So a number of alternatives that are there but as the minister has mentioned we do need the public's assistance in wherever possible arranging accommodation with family and friends. That's my update. Back to you, Minister. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Our next question is for Wolf-Depner Black Press. Please go ahead. Yes, thank you for taking my question. Back to the evacuation issue in Kelowna. So from what I understand the fire has been shifting southward towards UBC and into Kelowna. That's near Highway 97. What, how concerned are you right now that the fire might jump Highway 97 at the north end and then over then jump again Highway 97 on the other side in West Kelowna and then potentially cut off escape routes for Kelowna residents? I think that's a question over to Nicole. Maybe you can speak to some of the wildfire behaviour and what you're monitoring over there. The whole path that was kind of laid out in that question but we have the McDougal Creek proper for lack of a better term wildfire that is burning on the West Kelowna side. And then there have been additional fires that have started on the east side of Okanagan Lake. So that is the one that has moved towards UBCO there. It is suspected to be a result of Ember Brands from the McDougal Creek wildfire but that has yet to be officially confirmed or determined at this time. Because a lot of that activity on that east side of the lake moving towards UBCO and leading to some of those evacuations is new as of our time on this call here. I don't have enough information to comment one way or the other about what the wildfire activity might do. I guess what I will just say though is that we've seen significant growth on a lot of these fires. A lot of it is wind driven and due to the conditions it is likely that we will continue to see these fires spread quite quickly. How that wind presents on site with the local topography will really influence the way that the fire grows and the direction that the fire moves in and that really could change at any point in time just depending on what the local topography is doing in the area. Wolf did you have a follow-up? I did thank you. So earlier we heard that 3,500 people in the area in the Central Okanagan, Kelowna, West Kelowna have received orders to evacuate. What if any internal numbers do you have that might forecast what that number might be say at the end of the day by tomorrow? You know this is a rapidly evolving situation, very dynamic. I don't know that it's helpful to provide anticipatory numbers here. It is a situation that we are managing actively and right now. But what I will say is that we do an enormous amount of pre-planning work with the emergency operation centres in communities to prepare for various scenarios. Aside from that maybe I'll check in with Ian Cummings to see if he has any updates that he can offer that might be relevant here. Correct Minister, the planning now with that would reside with the local authority emergency operation centre. So I don't have what their advanced planning numbers would be as they work with the BC Wildfire Service to determine what potential growth on the fire may look like. As you've heard with the rapidly evolving situation that can be quite difficult to nail down. But I do know that the joint emergency operation centre in the Kelowna area is actively looking at that. Back to you Minister. Our next question is for Joujou, Globe and Mail. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question. The kind of assistance are you given to those who have to flee? You mentioned the evacuation centres. But will there be emergency funding available for those who have lost their homes and have nothing but what they can grab? So at this time our focus is on keeping people and communities safe from the active wildfire situation. If a community member receives an evacuation alert, they need to get prepared to leave at a moment's notice. When they receive an evacuation order, they must leave their homes immediately. The evacuation order comes with instructions on where to go if they require evacuation supports. Usually directs them to a evacuee reception centre. It could be in the nearby community. We often also work with other communities in the area that will act as host communities to receive evacuees as well. Through the emergency support services program, evacuees who require support can get assigned accommodations. They can get per diems to support incidentals and food and clothing and other services. There are things that they need during that evacuation as well. Many evacuees, however, will not require these supports. Many evacuees will be able to manage their own evacuation. They'll go in with their family and friends. Allegeable for billeting supports as well. And so the choice to go to family and friends does not completely cut you off from emergency support services. But those supports are available to support people in the evacuation. Jen, did you have a follow-up? Thanks. Thank you. Regarding hospital and continuing care patients from Northwest Territories, could you please tell how many are here now and how many more are expected and how much capacity BC has for more? Ian, do you have the latest numbers on the hospital patients arriving from Northwest Territories? I don't have the current numbers. We're still working on those. Minister of Ministry of Health has set up an assessment center of YVR Airport and have been working with Northwest Territories Health to be able to accommodate patients that needed to be evacuated out of the Northwest Territories and to produce Columbia. But we don't have current numbers at this time. Why don't we follow up with you once we've been able to connect with our colleagues over at Health? Like I said, even that evacuation support or the support work we're doing for Northwest Territories is also evolving. And so we'll follow up with our colleagues at Health and get back to you. Our next question is from Mary Griffin. Check news. Please go ahead. Could you try it again? Oh, there's much better. Try that. Hi, can you hear me on? I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, thank you. I'm just wondering because the West Carolina Fire Chief talked at length about this and the minister talked about it. And I think Cliff Chapman, but are the consequences for residents who are under evacuation order become trapped and then the emergency personnel are then put their lives at risk trying to rescue these people who are ignoring those original orders? I think what's important here is for people to recognize that evacuation orders are not issued lightly. And when we issue them, it is because they are absolutely necessary. I know that it is incredibly challenging to leave everything that you love behind. I know that evacuating your home is very difficult, but we need people to adhere to those evacuation orders when they receive them. They're not just putting themselves at risk. They're also putting the responders at risk as well. And I think that that is the greatest consequence of ignoring an evacuation order. It is the loss of life that could actively happen as a result. Mary, did you have a follow-up? I did. I was just hoping to get some figures on just the number of personnel who were involved in Kelowna, West Kelowna, number of RCMP members, the number of firefighting personnel, and also in terms of the equipment, the helicopters and six-wing aircraft that are deployed to fight these fires. I don't know if we're going to be able to provide a consolidated number. I'll turn it over to Nicole to speak to BC Wildfire Service Assets on anything else that she might have, but we might have to follow up with you on some of the other numbers. Nicole? Yeah, thanks. I think we will have to do a follow-up at the end of the day just because everything is so dynamic and there's a lot of really quickly evolving pieces happening right now. Resources are being added and the number that we would have now would not be accurate towards the end of the day. So I think once we've got a few more things in place and have a bit better idea of what's happened outside of my time spent on this call, we'll be able to provide some numbers. So if you want to reach out to myself at the incident here, then we'll be able to get you some of those numbers at the end of this and there'll be contact information for myself at the incident on the incident page for the McDougal Creek Wildfire that's accessed through the BC Wildfire Service website and our interactive map. We have time for one more question or final question today is going to be in the room with Angela Jones, UTB. Please go ahead. I have a follow-up on the Yellowknife evacuees. Dozens more landed in YVR today. What is the province doing to accommodate these evacuees and do we really have the capacity to do this given how extreme our situation is? Yeah. So Northwest Territories is also facing a very challenging situation. They're working with provinces to receive evacuees at this time the primary partner for receiving evacuees for the Northwest Territories is Alberta and Saskatchewan. British Columbia really is a secondary partner and in particular given the challenges that we are facing here in this province we've communicated to the federal government and those challenges and they're very well aware of it. So far for what we have over at YVR we do have a reception centre for folks coming in from the Northwest Territories it's staffed with folks from the city of Vancouver, EMCR, Salvation Army is providing emergency support service triaging there working together to basically assess folks who are landing. So far most of the people who have landed at YVR from Northwest Territories has not required emergency support services. They have arrived under their own resources. They have their own plan. They're on their way. Where we are providing support so far is on the health side. We can provide those updated numbers as of yesterday we were expecting about 55 people 55 patients and care home residents and I don't know where we actually ended up landing because again everything is changing very quickly but most folks that are landing in YVR from Northwest Territories so far are coming on their on their own resources. If that changes, well it may change but that's the latest information that we have. Did you have a follow up? I'll end it on a somewhat positive note. A question for Cliff Chapman. We see that Surrey firefighters are being deployed to help out with the wildfire in the central Okanagan. How many other local fire departments have sent out resources to help various wildfires in the province and what does it mean to the wildfire service to get this additional assistance? Go ahead, Cliff. Great question and really I think a great opportunity to say thank you across BC to the municipal fire departments and local fire departments across the province. We have a great partnership and an interagency agreement between BC Wildfire Service and the Fire Chiefs Association of BC. That partnership allows us to have very real and candid operational response conversations and deploy assets from those municipal departments. So it's in large part thank you to Emergency Management and Climate Readiness BC. In addition to the office of the Fire Commissioner and BC Wildfire Service with all of those departments across the province. Really stepping up to support the effort in lots of these fires. Now they are both wildfires on crown land but they're also structure fires now as we've seen with the devastation in West Kelowna as well as across other parts of BC. And so it's really invaluable to have our staff being able to work hand in hand seamlessly with fire departments from across BC and we cannot thank them enough for their continued effort and in supporting this really challenging fire season that we're faced with.