Officials said a “significant” number of buildings caught fire in West Kelowna, a city of 36,000 people, and more than 2,400 homes were evacuated.
About 19,000 of the city’s 20,000 inhabitants had evacuated, the territories’ environment and communities minister Shane Thompson told reporters.
Premier of the province, David Eby, said that evening that the situation had “evolved rapidly” and officials were braced for “an extremely challenging situation in the days ahead”.
Canada is having its worst wildfire season on record, with at least 1,000 fires burning across the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre (CIFFC).
Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more and more moisture out of the ground – which can provide fuel for fires that can spread at an incredible speed, particularly if winds are strong.
Earlier, West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund described the wildfire as “devastating”.
“We fought hard last night to protect our community. We fought 100 years worth of fires all in one night,” he added.
Juliana Loewen lives in Kelowna – a larger twin city of West Kelowna on the eastern shore of Okanagan Lake.
She told the BBC how locals had watched a plume of smoke coming over the mountainside like an “ominous cloud of destruction” and how some on the Trader’s Cove side jumped into the lake as the fire spread and exit routes were blocked.
Her brother and grandmother fled to her house after “the fire jumped very quickly from one tree to an entire area, threatening an entire residential community”.
Local residents are used to the fires because of a “California-style climate” in the area – but the heat, dryness and wind seen in recent days had created the “perfect conditions for a firestorm”, Loewen added.
The airspace around Kelowna International Airport has now been closed to everything other than aerial firefighters.
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