Dozens of people have been ordered out of their homes and given permission to return home as the Keremeos Creek wildfirespreads.
At a Wednesday morning meeting, a local district representative of Okanagan-Similkameen said the evacuation order for homes in the area north of Olala from Highway 3A to Sheep Creek Road had been cancelled. said. This means that 54 facilities in the area are on evacuation alert because the wildfire threat has not been fully mitigated.
The evacuation warning property west of Route 3A has also been cancelled.
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The total is still high. 493 people under evacuation orders, 909 people under evacuation warning.
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Part of Highway 3A has also reopened, but not all of it. The area around Olala is still closed to traffic.
Mikhail Elsay, Fire Information Officer for BC Wildfire, said 3A remained closed around Olala. One of the reasons, he said, is because BC Wildfire deployed a lot of structure protection infrastructure in the community during the shootout, and it will take some time to rescue it.
Our crew and workers. The area is still closed so that we can safely extract them," he said.
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Elsay also warned local residents and the public to keep in mind that the 6,836-hectare fire is still out of control. , despite being gained in battle with it.
READ MORE: Keremeos Creek wildfire: Highway 3A still closed, cold temperatures forecast
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"The crew had a drone run overnight to better understand where the hotspots of interest were located in the corridors of Highway 3A. Operational thermal scanning was supported last night," Elsey said.
According to Elsay, thermal scanning allowed firefighters to locate the final spot, especially the rocky, hard-to-reach root system with deep burning.
"These drones It is sensitive and can pick up even very small amounts of heat," he said.
Elsay added that there is no set time as to when the shootout will end.
"This is a very large fire footprint in the landscape," he said. “Therefore, we are doing all we can to control this fire, but it is still a long way from fully resolving this issue.”
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