Bill Metcalfe, Nelson Star
Breakfast had to be ready by 6 a.m., but the cooks at New Denver’s Fireweed Hub were volunteers who had no idea how many people they had to feed.
Some of the volunteers had already been forced to evacuate by nearby wildfires and were working with the stress of not knowing if their homes might burn down. But for the moment, their focus was on providing food for visiting firefighters.
“We were scrambling to get enough buns but with some local donations, all worked out,” said Petra Hekkenberg, one of the volunteers. “That day some fire fighters came in with about 70 eggs that they had collected from evacuated homes on Red Mountain Road. Then dinner, we drove around town trying to locate all the responders to make sure they got food.”
They ended up successfully feeding 60 firefighters who had just arrived to fight the Silverton area fires on July 25, the first morning of the evacuation of the village and surrounding properties.
Over the next six days, until the evacuation order was lifted, volunteers found enough food and got into a flow of feeding large crews of firefighters, supporting Silverton, Red Mountain and Enterprise Creek residents who had been evacuated, and helping others who needed information and connection.
“The northern Slocan Valley is so connected that it was automatic,” says Katrina Sumrall, who was active in the volunteer effort in New Denver while she was evacuated from her home in Silverton. Before the evacuation, she and her daughter Danika Hammond, proprietors of the Silverton General Store, had already begun providing assistance to fire fighters at the store.
Sumrall said there are few restaurants in New Denver, and the town was faced with a sudden influx of firefighters working on multiple fires in the area.
“The approximately 80 responders that were scattered through town still did not have a clear food plan,” said Hekkenberg. “Everything happened so fast and there were fires all through the region and province. Crews came from all over. So while Katrina and Danika had just evacuated themselves, they partnered with the Fireweed hub to provide food for the responders.
The non-profit Fireweed Hub offers a full commercial kitchen and seating space to the community as well as space for co-working, meetings and workshops.
Hekkenberg said many evacuees did not have a kitchen to cook in, “and some locals (like myself even) were struggling to cook through the stress of the threatening fire. I, for example, had to evacuate for some days due to a new fire above my house and was grateful for this safe haven and opportunity to eat.”
The Hub fed about 50-plus firefighters and others for breakfast and dinner, and during the rest of the day provided snacks and coffee. Volunteers got up at 4 a.m. to make bag lunches for the firefighters.
After a few days, BC Wildfire Service entered into a contract with The Hub to provide meals for its crews.
But it was not just food for firefighters that was needed, says Hub co-manager and chef Hannah Weisbrich-Collier.
“We had a lot of displaced community members who really needed a place to gather, needed clean air, needed access to the internet,” she said. “When people got pushed out of Silverton we realized that we were going to need a space in New Denver to facilitate not only food, but really a place of community.”
A sense of purpose
The kitchen crew was run by Weisbrich-Collier and Hub co-manager Karin Dodds, and dozens of volunteers using locally sourced food.
Weisbrich-Collier looks back on those busy days in the kitchen as “truly beautiful, with a sense of coming together, just absolute love and care.”
“It was so fun,” says Sumrall. “It was cheerful. it was joyful. Everybody had a sense of purpose.”
She said they were sad to see the crews leave on the day the evacuation order at Silverton was lifted and the crews moved south to Winlaw from their camps at Centennial Park and at Lucerne Elementary School.
Weisbrich-Collier said the fire fighters praised the atmosphere at the Hub and the quality of the food.
“We had a lot of comments from them about how much they loved the community and that they really felt taken care of.”
She said the appreciation was not just about food.
“We were really trying to embrace them and make them know that they were loved and that we appreciate that it’s a hard job and risky and traumatizing.”
‘Protect what we all value’
Sumrall said this rally in the face of tragedy has built bridges between people with different political opinions. She said the community, like many others, has been politically divided, especially since the pandemic.
“In the kitchen, they didn’t care about any of that. They just said, ‘We want to feed these guys. We live here, and because we appreciate the environment and the beauty, let’s make them healthy and strong so they can get out here and protect what we all value.’”
Weisbrich-Collier said on Aug. 2 that the community is feeling a sense of reprieve in recent days. She acknowledged, however, that there are residents of Red Mountain and Enterprise Creek that are still under an evacuation order. The Hub is still open every day, although with much less activity.
“But I think that people are still feeling quite on edge,” she said. “Valhalla Park is still burning, all across the lake is still burning, burning, burning. This is not over. We just have reached a point where we have kind of turned a corner.”