Courtney Laporte, Billy Newhook and their three children, Carter, Madison and Hannah, left 100 Mile House before the evacuation order was given.
“I didn’t want to wait,” says Laporte, “He was actually on the roof taking pictures and the smoke was barrelling over and I just thought, ‘Okay. Time to go.’ We left about 7 p.m. Friday night.”
That was on July 7, the second day of the fire.
“We drove through the night, ended up on the side of the road in Peachland with our trailer,” she says.
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The family carried on to Penticton to stay with Laporte’s brother, but she says bylaw in the city was unhappy with the trailer parked at the house, so they moved on.
“We ended up going to the Shuswap Blind Bay Resort who took us on along with other evacuees free of charge. It was very accommodating.”
The family was at a festival in Salmon Arm when they heard via social media that they could go home. They turned around, quickly loaded up and were on the road home as soon as possible.
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While the children have nothing bad to say about being evacuated (“it was fun”), Laporte says that it was stressful.
“They were tired, they were scared. They were at daycare when I picked them up that day. It was terrifying,” she says.
Laporte and Billy did their best to keep them busy.
“It was good because we were away from it,” says Laporte. “You weren’t where the grocery stores were running out of food, so we just kept them busy by going to the lake or the pool.”
The siblings were busy playing and picking raspberries as soon as they arrived home, but Laporte says she spent some sleepless nights after they left.
“I didn’t know. It was just right there, coming, 1 km from the house. So you just don’t know. You don’t know if you are going to go back to anything.”
Now that they’re home, Laporte and Newhook expect to be back to work as soon as possible. But first, they want to get some normality back into their lives.
“We’re going to do laundry — the bedding — and get into the bed and have a bath because we’ve been in an RV trailer for two weeks.”
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