Some people, it seems, never learn.
A driver was caught last week by West Shore RCMP tossing a cigarette butt out a vehicle window, earning the driver a $575 ticket. Another man in the Okanagan was fined $1,150 last week for having an open fire.
With smoke still in the air from wildfires blazing around the B.C. Interior, this bright spark decided not only to have a campfire but to go to sleep with it still burning.
He claims not to have known about the ongoing fire ban, but that doesn’t really matter. Anyone should have more common sense than to start a fire in tinder-dry conditions without a water source close at hand and, especially, than to leave it untended.
These two careless acts could have turned into a disaster in the space of a few minutes, putting more forests, homes and people at risk.
With the Finlay Creek fire burning between Peachland and Summerland, we are getting a closer look than we would like at how close to the edge of disaster we all live. The B.C. Interior has had a hard year, being hit by flooding and the fires that followed so quickly people didn’t even have time to heave a sigh of relief.
And when you look at the damage Hurricane Harvey did in Texas, it is truly frightening how fast conditions can turn from normal to disaster.
There isn’t much that can be done for a Hurricane Harvey level disaster. There is little that can be done to stop the water. All people can do is fill sandbags and hope, and with rains like those seen in Texas, that just wasn’t enough.
But when it comes to forest fires, we can be proactive. There may not be much that can be done about lightning and other natural causes for fires, but we can smarten up — stop throwing cigarettes out of cars and lighting campfires that serve no useful purpose.
It’s a message that everyone should have received by now, but it seems that some people just won’t listen.