PENTICTON — The first sign of trouble for Aviana Ferlizza, the manager of Zias family restaurant in Summerland, was a phone call to cancel a reservation.

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It was around 5:45 p.m. on the Friday the Bald Range wildfire broke out, and a customer from Faulder was calling to say they wouldn’t make it — there was a plume of smoke out their way. Ferlizza checked online and thought it looked small. Then she walked to the front of the restaurant and looked up.

Their busiest month, gone: Summerland’s restaurants and cafés count the cost of a lost season Back to video

“I was like, ‘Oh, shit, we’re in big trouble right now,’” she said.

They kept serving anyway. The restaurant was nearly sold out, and the staff carried on as the sky turned orange and ash began drifting onto the patio where people were still eating.

Aviana’s mother, Shannon Ferlizza, who owns Zias, compared it to a scene from a movie.

“The piano player kept playing, glasses were tinkling,” Shannon said. “If you remember the Titanic, where that was all going on as the ship was sinking — that’s how we felt.”

The order to leave came at 1 a.m., the scariest stretch of the night, she said — the town’s emergency air horns sounding as the family loaded the cars, ash everywhere, chunks of smouldering wood dropping into yards.

The Ferlizza family got out, though they had to leave their pig behind on the farm. The family has been in Penticton ever since, waiting, like everyone else.

For the restaurants and cafés of Summerland, summer is the whole year. The Okanagan town draws visitors to its lake beaches and vineyards through the warm months, and June through September is when its businesses earn enough money to see them through the winter. This year the fire emptied the town at the peak of the season, sending more than 12,000 people out under evacuation orders.

“These are the months where we make the money that gets us going for the rest of the year,” Shannon said. “They’re by far our biggest months.”

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The fire that pushed them out started that Friday afternoon west of Summerland and grew explosively. The latest update Wednesday had the fire mapped at more than 184 square kilometres, up from 156 square kilometres the day before, still burning out of control.

Premier David Eby said during a news conference that this kind of rapid fire activity might be “our new normal” in B.C. He reassured residents out of their homes that they will get help, noting they may have to stay away for a while yet.

B.C.’s minister of emergency management, Kelly Greene, said a large number of first responders are travelling through the evacuated areas doing damage assessments and providing security for the empty homes.

Greene said it is too early to say when residents can check on their homes themselves, but that officials are making direct contact with anyone who has lost property to the blaze.

There are 16 people in the house Ferlizzas are staying in now, with two trailers out front to take the overflow.

The house belongs to Shannon’s relatives, who have gone to Vancouver to free it up; the two other families staying there are Zias staff and their families, whom the Ferlizzas took in after they’d been stranded in a Walmart parking lot.

“We kind of try to split up during the day, so we don’t kill each other,” Shannon said jokingly.

Zias itself came through the fire fine. Shannon has been watching it on the security cameras — 150 seats, 45 staff, open since 1998, still standing in a town no one can enter.

All her employees are out of work, and most of them can’t yet get employment insurance.

“We can’t even offer EI, because we can’t get them the paperwork,” she said. “Everything’s in Summerland.”

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Some of her staff have lost far more than hours. Two lost their homes.

One, a woman from Faulder who has worked at Zias for more than 20 years, showed up at the restaurant the night the fire came, having just learned her house had burnt down.

“She said, ‘My house is gone. Can you feed me?’” Shannon recalled.

The family fed her and helped her find a room at the motel next door — from which she had to evacuate again as the evacuation order reached Summerland.

Shannon said she knows she’s been luckier than most. Her insurance company advanced the family money for the first week, on top of the emergency funds the province sent early on. But it wasn’t really about the money, she said.

“It’s that you feel that you have support,” she said. “We can move forward.”

Not everyone has that footing. A few kilometres away, Iuliia Borysenko and Andrii Murat are waiting on their insurer with far less certainty.

The couple opened a second location of their café, Sunflower, on June 19 — a bigger kitchen in Penticton to go with their original shop in Summerland. Two months in, they’re closed and doing the math on how long they can last.

“We are closed. We have some money that we earned,” Murat said. “The question is for the future.”

He described it as a chain reaction. Evacuees will come home to weeks of hotel bills, missed paycheques and spoiled groceries to replace — and won’t be spending what’s left in cafés. Fewer customers means fewer hours for staff, and staff who leave.

“August is the month when you earn money, because you spend it in January,” Borysenko said. She says the month accounts for 20 to 30 per cent of their annual sales, and says the rest of the year they run at a loss.

For a new business whose owners hold work permits rather than permanent residency, there’s no cushion. The banks all know their café, she said, and still won’t lend to them.

They aren’t counting on government help. What Murat hopes for instead is that the town finds a way to draw people back once it’s over.

“Maybe hold some festivals, so that people come and raise the economy,” he said.

There was, at least, one piece of good news this week. The pig Aviana had to leave behind on her farm made it out Wednesday afternoon; an officer with access into the evacuation zone got the animal off the property and back to the family in Penticton.

One small thing, in these long uncertain days, that finally went right.

With files from Joe Ruttle

oshtohryn@postmedia.com