B.C. residents should be prepared to flee wildfires at a moment's notice, warns meteorologist

Claire Martin still has her grab-and-go bag ready and waiting. She had been under an evacuation alert at her home in Vernon, B.C., which was rescinded after some rainfall last weekend.

But Martin isn't out of the woods yet, with hot and dry conditions expected to return throughout the week.

Temperatures are expected to climb to 37 C in Kamloops on Saturday, which has three large fires to the west, and the White Rock Lake fire burning east of the city.

Martin, a former senior meteorologist at the CBC and a manager with Environment and Climate Change Canada, told The Current's Laura Lynch that the wildfires, while terrifying, aren't surprising, and people should make sure they're prepared. 

Here is part of their conversation. 

I'm wondering if you can tell me what the wildfire situation is like right now where you are in Vernon? 

On Thursday and Friday, it was terrifying. I mean, I've covered tornadoes and hurricanes. I've been in dangerous weather. I've never seen a living, breathing fire.

It is literally like a beast. You could hear it. It was growling. It was snapping and crackling. It was absolutely terrifying. And I'm across the lake from where the fire really was devastating an area. 

It's so strange when you sort of know the conditions from a meteorological standpoint that have compounded the problem to actually see it in front of you and to know that you might lose your house and your home. It's mind blowing. 

You tweeted that you had your evacuation bag ready to go. I'm sure you've never been through that before. What was it like to decide what you needed to take to save your own life? 

It's surreal. You know, everybody that's listening right now, wherever you're in, if you're in an office or in your living room or possibly working at home from a bedroom or a second room, look around that room. Do this right now.

Just look around and picture one thing that you cannot live without that is so precious to you you're going to take. Now go to another room and do the same. Pretty much within four or five minutes, that's everything that you can take that's precious. 

I call the rule the PPP rule. So pets are really precious. Paperwork. Your marriage certificate, your driving licence, your health records, anything that's precious.

All these things you're going to have to grab and label and basically put by the car because you're not going to have time when that fire engine goes by with the sirens going to get out and to think coherently. 

So I had everybody in the community get their grab-and-go get bags ready, take a photo of it to prove to me that they've done it and then know that that can't move until we're out of this situation. 

How big a problem are fires like this going to be for B.C. moving forward? 

The IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report that came out a couple of days ago states that quite clearly, in fact, it literally states, it cites Canada as warming at nearly twice the global rate, and then furthermore, it cites that parts of western and northern Canada are warming at three times the global average. 

It was always hard to convince people ... when you live in Canada, a country that's known for snow and ice and hockey, that warming is not necessarily a good thing, that that link between climate change and more frequent and more powerful weather events is now very, very clear.

Weather events include heat waves, fires, flooding, sea ice loss. 

In June, I really wanted to do radio interviews because the temperatures were so astounding. I was on a chat list with meteorologists — you know, hardened scientific brains — about just how hot it was and how we were forecasting temperatures that we were shaking our heads at. 

And now we're into the fires and it's still going to be a long, hot season and the IPCC report tells us that. 

[Do you] think there's enough being done to mitigate the risks?

Oh, that's tough. Yeah, that's the question, right? We the scientists, we're the people that tell you about the data. We're the ones that say this is happening. Here are the links. The events are going to become more compound events. So we'll get heat waves and droughts simultaneously.

Are we doing enough to mitigate? You know what, that's for the politicians to answer that one. My job is to make sure people stay safe. 

We're looking at rising temperatures in your region again. I know that the mayor's been saying that Vernon is worried about winds and heat. What do you see coming up in the next 24, 48 hours there? 

Right now, there's one of two scenarios. The fire that is still left will turn in on itself and try to burn the ground that has already been scorched so there's less fuel, which is a good thing. 

But once we start getting really hot temperatures and an erratic wind, then the fire becomes explosive and it will become another long week into the long months, into another long summer for us.

Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Julie Crysler and Matt Meuse. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Anyone placed under an evacuation order should leave the area immediately. 

Evacuation centres have been set up throughout the province to assist anyone evacuating from a community under threat from a wildfire. To find the centre closest to you, visit the Emergency Management B.C. website.

Evacuees are encouraged to register with Emergency Support Services online, whether or not they access services at an evacuation centre.