‘Like a hurricane’: Clinton, B.C., residents flee for their lives from wildfire

When the flames advanced on the B.C. Interior village of Clinton late Friday, Nicolas Kosovic could barely believe what he saw.

The operator of the Stagecoach Cafe believed he was one of the last people to get out of the community after it was ordered evacuated, in the face of the Big Bar complex of wildfires that village and regional authorities said posed an immediate and significant threat to their lives.

Kosovic, who made more than 100 sandwiches with his mother to hand out to fellow residents as they fled for their lives, said gale-force winds heralded the arrival of the fire, as he watched it crest a hill to the south of the café.

It grew to a “massive flame” as winds filled the air with debris and dust, flinging traffic cones through the deserted streets of the village of several hundred residents about 350 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

“It was like a hurricane, the dust, you couldn’t see anything it was so thick,” he said. “It wasn’t anything like what I expected a wildfire to look like.”

He grew emotional as he recounted the experience, paying tribute to firefighters who he and his mother have been feeding for the past week.

The BC Wildfire Service said groundcrews were forced to retreat on Friday, so aggressive was the blaze.

“I can’t believe wildfire fighters endure conditions like that,” Kosovic said, his voice cracking.

“That is so much more than I ever anticipated. It makes me very proud to observe them over the last week. It was a really eye-opening experience to see that level of courage from them … I couldn’t believe that anyone would stay behind and defend the town in stuff like that.”

The village was ordered evacuated around 11:30 a.m., before the order was expanded around 5:30 p.m.

Kosovic’s mother got out around 4 p.m., while her son believed he was one of the last to escape about an hour later. He was speaking from the road north of Clinton where he was helping others, the flames and fury behind them.

Clinton Mayor Roland Stanke said the situation in the community was “extremely bad.”

“I’m gonna lose my house any minute. It’s horrible,” he said in a brief interview late Friday.

Stanke said he got out in the afternoon and had been watching the fires advance via cameras set up at his home, saying that what he saw “was bad.”

Anyone in Clinton or south of the village was told to immediately evacuate south on Highway 97 to Kamloops, while residents north of Clinton to Chasm were told to use Highway 24 and head to Kamloops North.

The Thompson-Nicola Regional District said evacuation orders covered more than 470 properties in and around Clinton and on the Bonaparte Plateau.

It said residents in the evacuation zone had to leave immediately, and no one must enter the area “due to immediate danger to life safety caused by the Fiftynine Creek wildfire” northwest of the village.

The BC Wildfire Service said the fire had pushed past containment efforts on its southwest flank, with aggressive fire behaviour.

“Crews have been pulled back to safe areas and will assess for opportunities to re-engage,” the service said in an update.

The service said the fire was showing rank-five behaviour on a six-rank scale, meaning an extremely vigorous fire burning in the crowns of trees, with ground firefighting operations restricted.

Advancing from the south of Clinton was the Pear Lake fire, which the wildfire service said had pushed across Kelly Lake Road leading into the village in multiple locations.

Resident Mary Ann McKenzie said she got out around noon, escaping with her daughter-in-law, visiting from Germany, and McKenzie’s dog.

Ashes were falling from the sky — at first “little grey ashes, then they became much bigger, black ashes.”

She said residents had known the evacuation order could come on Friday, and while it was emotional to have to leave, the evacuation was “well paced.”

“It’s still very sad and I’m scared for my little home. But I’ve done whatever I can do, it’s out of my hands now,” she said from Kamloops.

Clinton is one of three B.C. communities that are under threat from complexes of major wildfires that rapidly grew, merged and displayed aggressive behaviour on Friday.

The British Columbia government said before Clinton’s evacuation that roughly 1,200 properties were under evacuation orders across the province, double the number on Tuesday and including the entire community of Boston Bar in the Fraser Canyon, about 200 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.

The Anderson Creek and Ainslie Creek fires have now combined, and with the Brunswick Creek fire they form an out-of-control complex of blazes that surrounds Boston Bar and spans about 340 square kilometres.

The Big Bar complex is threatening Clinton two hundred kilometres to the north.

The Fiftynine Creek fire had grown from about 100 square kilometres on Thursday afternoon to more than 167 square kilometres on Friday.

The Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness also said an estimated 6,400 properties were under evacuation alert across B.C., with residents told to be ready to leave at short notice.

Most of those are in Kimberley, in southeast B.C., where the Bootleg complex consists of several fires.

The updated numbers came as roughly 120 wildfires blazed across B.C. late Friday, mostly in the southern and central Interior, with about 35 having started in the previous 24 hours.

Colton Davies, an information officer with the Thompson-Nicola Regional District, had said earlier Friday that as many as a dozen people had already lost their homes in the fires near Clinton.

Most were vacation or secondary homes, although some were primary residences, he said.

Another 15 properties had non-residential structures burn down, with most of the destruction around the southeast portion of Big Bar Lake.

Davies added that wildfire conditions had escalated over the past week due to hot weather.

The district was also dealing with the fires around Boston Bar, expanding an evacuation alert due to the Ainslie Creek fire on Friday to around 110 properties roughly 32 kilometres southeast of Merritt.

The BC Wildfire Service said protecting structures around Boston Bar was the priority as firefighting efforts continued there.

The Regional District of East Kootenay said about 5,400 properties within the city of Kimberley, and 66 properties in the St. Mary Lake area, are under the alert due to a cluster of wildfires west of the city.

“We are anticipating there may be other starts today as a result of last night’s lightning and given the hot, dry conditions and potential wind over the next few days,” the district said in an update Friday.

The impact of the wildfires was also being felt beyond the three B.C. communities under direct threat.

BC Hydro said households across the province may be experiencing flickering lights and power interruptions or fluctuations due to the wildfire activity near Clinton, and crews cannot access the site to make repairs to equipment.

Kosovic said he did not believe his home was at risk, and things could have been worse for him and his mother.

“We’re the lucky ones right now, and so we’re going to just keep going,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 24, 2026.

Nono Shen and Marissa Birnie, The Canadian Press