Two years after a beast of a fire swallowed the entire village of Lytton, British Columbia, rebuilding is stalled, the inferno’s cause remains undeclared, and the despairing community is suing Canada’s railways for letting trains barrel through the region during a deadly heat dome.
“On June 30, 2021, despite the extreme weather conditions, current wildfire risk, and the ongoing wildfires in the area, both CP Rail and CN Rail continued railway operations in the area of the village,” reads the civil lawsuit filed by the Village of Lytton and the Thompson-Nicola Regional District (TNRD), CBC News reports.
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The precise cause of the fire has not been officially determined, but some kind of human factor is suspected. CBC reports that though the federal Transportation Safety Board (TSB) ruled out a definitive connection between railway activity and the wildfire, the lawsuit states that a train travelled through the village 18 minutes before the flames were sparked. The TSB had previously found the fire started “within five feet” of the railway track, which runs right through the community.
TNRD and Lytton are arguing that the rail companies and Transport Canada breached their duty of care to the village just before the fire, and that trains should have been halted that day. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
First reported at 4:38 PM on a 49.5°C day, the blaze grew rapidly, driven by strong winds and tinder-dry grass and shrubs. It travelled through the region “like a snake or a dragon from home to home,” said then-Kanaka Bar Indian Band Chief Patrick Michell, recalling the fire’s speed and trajectory in a 2022 interview with Green Energy Futures. Located on traditional territory around 14 kilometres south of Lytton, his home too was lost to the fire.
By 6 PM, all of Lytton was aflame. Two senior citizens died in the conflagration, and more than 90% of the village was razed to the ground. More than 1,000 people fled Lytton and nearby areas after the fire, and it was only in June 2023 that the local state of emergency was lifted, allowing residents to return to their properties.
“With rebuilding progress slow even two years later, the village and the regional district are seeking costs and damages,” reports CBC. “The costs to rebuild the village have ballooned over a hundred million dollars.”
A Painfully Slow Rebuild
Had Lytton been bigger, B.C.’s post-disaster process might have worked to ensure a rapid rebuild. But the village is tiny (population 250), the fire was a beast, and those facts—combined with the anguish and confusion of residents—have left the community in limbo, reports the Fraser Valley Current.
Nearly two years after the blaze, “rebuilding remains a goal, not a task.” With most homes and structures entirely destroyed, there remains no foundation from which to rebuild.
“B.C. fires typically start outside of a town or city and nip at the community’s fringes,” the Current explains. “They may take a chunk out of a town or paralyze an entire city, but after the embers cool, life in the majority of a city can begin to return to normal.”
At that point, “residents return to the surviving houses, while those who lost homes can find temporary accommodations in hotels or with friends or families. The grocery stores and offices and police departments fundamental to 21st century life remain.”
No trace of these essential services remained in Lytton post-fire, with crucial village records also lost to the flames. Residents, including city council and staff, who would have been instrumental in galvanizing the recovery, were forced to flee and would spend the next many months as evacuees in far-flung places.
The complete erasure of Lytton and exodus of its inhabitants led directly to another reason it still remains “a flattened heap of dirt and concrete:” nobody was left behind to implement the province’s post-disaster process, which rests on the principle that rebuilding is up to the locals.
Abbotsford, B.C. would prove through its efficient, though no less painful, recovery from flooding after 2021’s atmospheric river that the province’s post-disaster process can work, writes the Current. But only when community and infrastructure persist post-cataclysm.
In ravaged Lytton, the process stalled completely, leaving many residents feeling like victims of a soulless bureaucracy.
No One Available to Lead
There has never been a lack of dollars. The province provided C$9.3 million to support village operations and early recovery in the first few months after the disaster and paid $18.4 million for all debris removal and remediation work. Almost a year to the day after the fire, the B.C. government pledged a further $21 million to help restore essential infrastructure like water, hydro, sewage, and other services. That was about a week after the federal government earmarked $77 million to help make Lytton more fire-resilient, especially its public buildings.
Unfortunately, and especially in the first year after the fire, there was no one in Lytton with the bandwidth to administer the funds. Well-intentioned officials got the dollars lined up, “then waited to see how the municipality wanted to spend that money, relying on Lytton officials to take the lead, without seeming to fully comprehend that it was incapable of doing so,” the Current writes.
One unfortunate example of bureaucratic disconnect was the failure to furnish the community with interim housing onsite, or at least close to home. Asked by the Current why Lytton residents never received interim housing, a government spokesperson said the community was offered the necessary funding but never submitted the necessary paperwork. “Shifting timelines” and demoralized staff, each one an evacuee, only served to compound the problem.
“A full year after the fire, Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth was promising rebuilding was imminent and would likely begin in a couple months,” The Current writes. That promise would prove hollow.
This is not to say that the province did not try to respond to Lytton’s profound distress and incapacity. Immediately after the fire, B.C. called Kelowna-based Ron Mattiussi for his expert advice. Known as a go-to person for municipal disaster recovery, Mattiussi had guided Kelowna through its own recovery from wildfire in 2003. He went on to play key roles in Fort McMurray, which was devastated by fire in 2016, and Grand Forks, B.C., inundated by flooding in 2018.
“After months of little progress on the ground and amid increased resident complaints, Mattiussi was asked to provide more hands-on guidance and help the village’s council set a path toward recovery,” writes the Current. “Eventually, after the village’s overwhelmed chief administrative officer quit, the outside expert was asked to step in to head the municipality’s bureaucracy.”
Mattiussi left that post last year, citing the extreme stress of the job. “[I left] for my own physical health,” said.
A ‘Community of the Future’ On Hold
Best intentions also attended early responses from observers who saw from afar what had happened in Lytton, connected the dots to the climate crisis, and offered their expertise to try and ensure that nothing so terrible would ever befall the community again.
Days after the fire, then-premier John Horgan promised Lytton would be rebuilt as a “community of the future,” writes the Current: a sustainable, resilient community built to withstand the challenges of an overheating world that could serve as a case study for other places in Canada and around the world.
Melanie Ross, scientific strategy lead for the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s (SAIT) Green Building Technologies research activities, was among those who wanted to help Lytton deliver on that promise. Ross partnered with the Kanaka Bar Indian Band, Okanagan College, Foresight Canada, and Calgary-based Seko Construction to launch the Resilient Housing Solutions pilot project in January, 2022. The pilot was meant to “include the design and build of four to eight homes to test and validate material properties, climate resiliency, energy performance, and affordability.”
With Lytton the immediate recipient of that learning, a broad goal was “to develop a suite of viable options for the region, and other communities, throughout medium- and long-term rebuilding activities.”
The net-zero-ready structures were initially expected to be ready for occupancy by September, 2022. But the project’s status is unclear, with no reports of completion at present. (Supply chain issues could be a major factor causing delays. Last July, B.C. Construction Association President Chris Atchison described delivery bottlenecks as the worst he had ever seen.)
SAIT spokesperson Kate Laverdure told The Energy Mix in May that the institute would reach out with updates when they become available. Newly-elected Kanaka Bar Chief Jordan Spinks did not reply to requests for comment.
Back in Lytton, other factors have contributed to the glacial pace of recovery. A report on possible environmental contamination was slow to be released. Once published, it “wasn’t provided to residents for several weeks, heightening the tension and uncertainty.”
There was also the necessary and painstaking process of recovering any Indigenous artefacts found in the process of removing contaminated soil—since First Nations have lived in the region for millennia and Lytton was built on an ancient First Nations settlement.
A Fractured City Council
Then there was a hitch in Lytton’s municipal politics, with the mayor and council unable to marshal the trust needed to help the village move on.
“Often after a natural disaster hits a community, that city or town’s local politicians become fixtures in the media and around their communities,” writes the Current. “They help rally spirits and plead for money and resources from senior levels of government.”
But in Lytton, the village splintered over the then-council’s proposal for a strict, climate-resilient building bylaw. In language that echoed Horgan’s vision of “a community of the future,” the council signalled its intent to require “stringent energy efficiency and fire mitigation measures.”
Desperate to recover the familiar, some locals balked at language that seemed to target items central to their identity and comfort, like barbecues, and items crucial to their safety, like wood-burning stoves. Even those who understood the need to rebuild with fire resilience in mind objected to what they said was a failure to consult, writes the Current.
The bylaw eventually adopted by the village “would be more moderate than first suggested,” but the “damaging gap between residents and their elected leaders had already been established.”
The October, 2022 municipal elections found the majority of Lytton’s incumbents declining to run again. One outgoing councillor accused her successors of hypocrisy for thanking the (outgoing) council for the good job it had done, “when they’re the people who have been harassing and attacking this council for 15 months.”
Four months into her job as Lytton’s new mayor, Denise O’Connor—a once vocal critic of the previous council—said the learning curve had been steep and humbling.
“We all thought, ‘We’re just going to be able to get in there and start getting things moving,’ and that’s not the case,” she said.
O’Connor stood firm on her assertion that rebuilding efforts could have started much sooner, but she was less inclined to point fingers, writes the Current.
“People ask me now: ‘Who do you blame?’” O’Connor said. “And I don’t really know.”
She is just relieved to tell her constituents that the state of emergency has been lifted, so they can finally return home and start the process of rebuilding.
Lytton local Danny Yan, who had been living in Richmond since his hotel burned to the ground in the fire, told CBC News he was pleased to hear he can go home.
“I want to rebuild,” he said. “I am happy.”
