PENTICTON — Walt Nickerson pushed a cart of groceries and supplies out of the Real Canadian Superstore on Monday evening, three days into a life he hadn’t planned for.

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He left Summerland after a 1:30 a.m. call Saturday from his landlord telling him everyone was fleeing. Running on 2½ hours of sleep, he pulled into Penticton around 3, set a chair beside his vehicle in the parking lot of the casino where he works, poured a coffee and waited for the doors to open at 10. When they did, staff told the evacuees in the lot that breakfast, lunch and supper were on the house — and opened it to everyone.

Summerland evacuees face lineups, uncertainty — and an outpouring of help Back to video

“A lot of places did that,” he said. “That was phenomenal.”

The support has come in pieces, each with its own line to stand in: a $112 food voucher, a $150 clothing allowance, $50 for hygiene essentials, a two-night motel stay. The food voucher, he said, doesn’t go far.

“That is never enough in today’s society,” he said. But the groceries in his cart would last him a week or more, and he had to eat anyway. “That’s kind of a free bit of money.”

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Nickerson is one of more than 12,000 people ordered out of Summerland — the largest evacuation in B.C. this year — after the Bald Range wildfire broke out about 15 kilometres west of the town shortly after 5 p.m. Friday. It exploded within hours, running toward Okanagan Lake and reaching an estimated 50 square kilometres by that night.

By Tuesday it had grown to more than 150 square kilometres and was still burning out of control, with officials warning of continued hot, dry weather and difficult fire behaviour in the days ahead.

The fire has killed one person. RCMP say an 80-year-old woman died Friday while trying to leave the Meadow Valley area, northwest of Summerland. Premier David Eby declared a provincial state of emergency on Aug. 8, saying homes had been lost. Officials have not said how many properties have burned.

Across B.C., nearly 22,000 people are under evacuation orders.

For the thousands driven out of Summerland, the days since have been a grind of lineups and unanswered questions — where they’ll sleep, whether they still have homes. What has carried many through, they say, is each other: the strangers, volunteers and businesses that have handed out meals, beds and supplies while the official system strains to catch up.

When the fire broke out, Penticton was full of summer tourists, Diane Bell, an emergency support services volunteer said, and there was nowhere to put evacuees at first. Some slept in their cars for several nights before staff could begin moving people into better accommodation.

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Inside the Penticton Trade and Convention Centre, where filming is not allowed and cameras stay at the door, the workings of a displaced town run in a single room: medical staff moving among evacuees, insurance representatives sitting with policyholders, support workers guiding people through forms, and constant lines for registration, for food, for answers. Fresh bottled water is stationed throughout.

Around the clock, a volunteer-run space keeps its doors open for the overflow.

Mario Majano, a volunteer with Junior Chamber International Penticton, has been there since Friday, part of a rotation staffing the room 24 hours a day for people who couldn’t check in anywhere else, or can’t sleep, and want a coffee or a late-night bite.

People come looking for a bit of everything, he said — food, toothbrushes, shampoo, a place to sit. With so many evacuees arriving with dogs and cats, PetSmart and a local pet resort dropped off food and supplies for the animals, too.

The hardest part, Majano said, is the uncertainty.

“People don’t know what’s happening, they don’t know what their homes are like,” he said. He described sharing tears with someone who’d just learned their home was gone — a house they’d bought 28 days earlier.

Some are still outside. Near a trailer with an air mattress laying on the ground right next to it, a group of neighbours had pulled camp chairs into a circle, several days now into living out of doors.

They didn’t want to be recorded or named but they said they were the ones who first reported the fire.

They scrolled back through their phones to show it. The first image, timestamped 4:45 p.m. Friday near Faulder, showed a single tall column of smoke rising from the trees, the kind you’d see off a big campfire. Frame by frame, the photos traced how fast it turned, and within about two hours the plume had grown taller, redder and more ominous.

Kelly Greene, B.C.’s minister of emergency management and climate readiness, said during a news conference some evacuees faced delays at the peak over the weekend, and that staffing has since been increased.

“People are standing by and ready to help you with your immediate needs,” Greene said, adding the province has block-booked 1,600 hotel rooms in Penticton, Kelowna and West Kelowna, along with 1,000 group-lodging spaces, often freed up as many tourists decided to head for home early.

Kevin Dunbar, executive director of emergency response and recovery operations, said the B.C. Evacuate helpline had been scaled up from its usual three agents to 60, and took more than 3,000 calls on Monday alone.

“I know that there have been some delays and lineups,” Dunbar said. “I really appreciate the patience that people are showing.”

Many evacuees still don’t know whether their homes survived. Tom Joseph was among the last to leave his street, and he said he’d seen it coming.

“I’ve been waiting for this to happen for 12 years,” said Joseph, 74, a reference to the dry, fuel-choked hills he and his neighbours had watched build up around Summerland.

Joseph stayed until about 2:30 a.m., watching the fire come down the mountain from a parking lot and then from the local ball diamonds, where he could see the whole line of it advancing. A gust of wind lit the south face at once, he said. One tree exploded like a firecracker, and he felt the heat of it from where he stood. Backyards half a block from his own were burning. An RCMP officer moved him along.

His house survived. He knows because someone shot video of his street around 6 a.m. on Saturday and he could see it still standing.

“I thought the whole street was gone,” he said. Many of his neighbours have no such answer.

Dunbar said he understood the urge to know more, but that Summerland is still an active, dangerous fire.

“That lack of information can be incredibly stressful,” he said, adding that rapid damage assessments will be carried out — with the help of Vancouver Fire Rescue’s heavy urban search and rescue team, which is trained for hazardous situations — only when it is safe to enter.

Officials also urged evacuees to reach their insurers, many of whom had set up inside the reception centre.

What both men kept coming back to was the food, and who was providing it.

Joseph said he hadn’t paid for a meal in four days — sandwiches handed out in the Walmart lot, a Sikh temple’s trays of rice and curry, free suppers from a nearby restaurant and a pizza place.

“Anywhere I go, there’s food for everybody,” he said. “I’ve never seen this before.”

Nickerson said the people offering rooms and meals mostly weren’t well-off. It was why he’d turned down a $200 daily allowance offered to evacuees who billet with someone — that money, he said, belongs to the host.

“They were everybody trying to make a go at it,” he said. “It’s a strain on them, because they don’t have the money either. But they’re doing it.”

The hardest part, Joseph said, is still coming, when people are let home to see what’s left.

“Wait till they get out there and see the property,” he said. “That’s when it sinks in. That’s when the tears flow.”

His advice for anyone who might one day be in his place is plain: Keep your valuables together, and pay attention. Plenty of people, he said, didn’t even know the fire was burning.

With files from Tiffany Crawford 

oshtohryn@postmedia.com