Fire Chief saw it strike!

Fire Chief Ken Tebo speaking to the media.

I was launching my boat at the downtown wharf when the fire was still on the hill. I was headed towards Sandy Point when a Martin Mars bomber landed on the water beside me with no warning. I didn’t know they were called in because at that time the fire was still on the hill. We weren’t part of the operation because, at that point, it was outside of our boundaries. . .

Photographed in the Salmon Arm Bay of Shuswap Lake, the Philippine Mars C-FLYK air tanker carried over 27,000 litres of water.

One of the legacies that I’m proud of is that the methodology and systems we developed during the fire were and still are the basis for urban forest fire fighting in the province. Even though Kelowna had a really bad disaster in 2003, they used what we had learned, implemented that into a procedure between the Forest Service and the local Fire Departments to ensure cooperation among the groups there.

Video transcript read more. . .