When wildfires threaten small communities, business owners face a unique challenge: the struggle to protect both lives and livelihoods.
Evacuations force not only families and pets to safety but also shutter storefronts and scatter employees.
When the evacuation is over, businesses need to re-establish their relationships with employees, suppliers and customers who may have also been displaced by the evacuation.
The survival of the business might be as stake, depending on the length of the evacuation and the degree of lost revenue.
This past summer, five large out-of-control wildfires burned in the Slocan Valley simultaneously, resulting in the closure of Highway 6 and evacuations of Silverton and Slocan as well as many rural properties.
This meant the closure of all businesses in those two communities, and restricted business in New Denver because of the highway closure and smoke.
The Slocan Village Market, which has been in owner Jordan Knott's family for 18 years, is Slocan's biggest employer and a social hub for the community. The evacuation happened at the market's busiest time of year.
"Typically June, July, August, are our best months by a considerable margin," Knott said. "The first two weeks of August are the best two weeks of sales of the year. And those were the weeks that that we lost."
The market was closed for 17 days from the end of July to the middle of August – the longest closure that the business has ever experienced.
The market and Knott's other business next door, Weed Be Delighted, a cannabis retail outlet, have 26 employees between them who Knott didn't want to lose.
So the market continued paying its employees when the Village of Slocan was evacuated on July 28.
"That was a decision that we made, because I don't think that it's realistic to expect that employment insurance is going to be sufficient for all of my employees to meet their basic needs," said Knott.
"We wanted to maintain those relationships," he said. "If our core employees aren't able to make ends meet, then they're going to need to find other work."
Knott's business relies on summer tourists from outside of the Kootenays, but also tourists from elsewhere in the West Kootenay – "Locals that come to use the lake and to enjoy the Valhalla Provincial Park and to enjoy the public beach here."
Closing down a grocery business for an indefinite amount of time means dealing with perishable food.
"We went through the same procedure that we do for a power outage," Knott said, "pulling everything off of the open display and putting it into the sealed coolers, blanketing over any of the freezers."
Knott was allowed a temporary access permit several times during the evacuation, to come in and load up on perishable food, which he donated to the Resilience Centre at Appledale, a hub for many people evacuated from Slocan and Silverton.
Farmers markets also have many local suppliers, mainly farmers and artisans, all of whom are businesses themselves.
Christina Knight runs the Saturday market in Slocan, with about 20 vendors every Saturday during the summer, and she also sells her own artistic creations – photography cards, jewellery, and wool products.
She said she closed down the market while Slocan was still under alert because "it was just apocalyptic. It was smoky, and nobody was able to breathe."
She lost four summer markets because of the evacuation.
"The market is where I make all my money, and where a lot of different vendors make their money ... we were devastated."
'Welcome home'
Maegan Deighton was shocked to see how much land had burned so close to town as she returned to her home in Slocan after the evacuation.
Then she saw a sign beside the highway that read, "Welcome home."
"Driving in with all my stuff – and it's still super smoky, it was still very Armageddon-like – at that point it hit me, and I just started crying. You don't really realize what kind of stress you're under and it might just hit you at a weird time."
Deighton had been holding it together – she says she handles stress well – through a double evacuation. She owns a business in Silverton (evacuated on July 24) and lives in Slocan (evacuated on July 28). But even before Silverton was evacuated, she could not access her store there because Highway 6 was closed on July 19, and stayed that way for almost a month.
At Caravan Company Goods in Silverton, Deighton sells gifts, retail clothing, second hand goods, and "a little mishmash of everything." The business has been in place for less than a year but Deighton has owned several retail businesses in the West Kootenay over the past several decades.
She says that for businesses in the Slocan Valley, the summer months are everything. But Deighton estimates she lost about 30 per cent of her annual revenue because of the fires.
For hospitality businesses, the financial consequences of an evacuation are potentially dire. If travellers cancel their bookings, they are unlikely to re-book. They are also less likely to book in an area known to be close to a fire.
Courtney Hulbert is the owner of two Slocan Valley businesses: the Col Guest House in Slocan, and Ice Creek Lodge, which offers backcountry hiking, skiing and snowboarding trips.
Hulbert says both businesses were fully booked for the summer, but she lost many bookings because of the fires and 50 per cent of her summer revenue.
Even though the fires did not come close to her backcountry lodge, Hulbert lost most of her revenue from that business because the province closed Valhalla Provincial Park, where her hiking and skiing tours take place.
She has a suggestion for B.C. Wildfire Service: during evacuation alerts, pay local accommodation businesses to house firefighters rather than putting them in camps or having them commute. She said B.C. Wildfire Service turned down her request for this, saying it is not their policy to house workers in an alert zone.
"But if firefighters are not safe there, then why are we (the residents) still there?"
New Denver councillor Danika Hammond, who is also co-owner of the Silverton General Store, said different businesses have different approaches to coming back from the fires.
"Unfortunately there have been some reduced staffing in several businesses, or reduced hours," she said, "but many are also turning to more innovative and creative ways to keep up business in the shoulder season with special events and offerings."
She gave this year's rescheduling of the Hills Garlic Festival as an example of extending the tourist season into late September. She said communities are looking at ways of marketing existing events and bringing people in for longer stays in the off-season.
"For example, come for the Blues Boogie, or the Spark in the Dark Lantern Festival, but stay for an entire weekend."
Help available
Ron Leblanc, the Slocan Valley economic development co-ordinator for Community Futures Central Kootenay (CFCK), notes that not all businesses in the valley were affected by evacuations in the same way. Some will teeter on the edge of survival and others will have the resources to get through.
"It's important not to make broad-stroke generalizations about how businesses were impacted," he said. "It's quite a range, and it really speaks to the individual businesses and the uniqueness of them."
Leblanc says Community Futures has set up a system of support for businesses affected by wildfires in the Slocan Valley and in the Argenta area.
They are offering low-interest loans of up to $20,000 with payments deferred up to six months. For a short while after the fires they offered free 30-minute business counselling session and free temporary office space.
CFCK is also offering a voucher and rebate program in which specific kinds of small purchases will be reimbursed by funding from the Columbia Basin Trust.
