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00:01After three years, the A-frame was weeks away from being ready,
00:05and I was ordered to evacuate because of this incredibly fast-moving wildfire.
00:10It's time to go now.
00:12I can see the flames cresting over the top of the hill right now.
00:17It doesn't look good.
00:22I'm Todd Talbot, and after ten seasons of Love It or List at Vancouver,
00:26my wife, Rebecca, and I invite you to join us on our building journey.
00:29We are building a net-zero passive house on the shores of Okanagan Lake in beautiful British Columbia.
00:34A resilient, energy-efficient, and architecturally stunning house.
00:38And even though this story doesn't end the way we planned it, it was an adventure.
00:43The moment everything felt super intense and real was when these unmarked cars came ripping down the driveway.
01:05I immediately knew that things were very serious.
01:10The guys jumped out and basically said, it's time to go now.
01:15And, you know, the tone in their voice was, it wasn't a negotiable kind of conversation.
01:21I made the decision to get everybody out there because it looked like it was going to become a problem sooner than the forecasting was predicting.
01:28We literally go door to door and convince them that they should leave.
01:33All the way up until that moment in time, I hadn't prepped anything because there was a part of me that really wanted to stay.
01:41And maybe a little bit of disbelief that this was actually going to come and affect our little bay.
01:49I started going up West Side Road.
01:55I texted Rebecca because she had the kids up in Vernon, which is about an hour north away.
02:08I had two phone calls as I was leaving.
02:10One of them was from Jillian Harris.
02:13She was kind of watching the fire from her house and they also had a farm that was being threatened by the fire as well.
02:22And my dad called me.
02:24Anytime I mentioned my dad, I get emotional.
02:29I don't get emotional about the house, but he phoned me to kind of just check in, make sure everything was okay.
02:34Because they didn't know what was going on.
02:37I arrived at the hotel and, of course, your phone is blowing up with people messaging you, asking you, like, are you okay?
02:46What's going on?
02:48We were talking about it in the hotel room and the kids would start to get upset.
02:52I said, we're safe, you know?
02:55And I fully believed it was going to be okay.
02:59I think Todd felt differently because he was there when the evacuation happened.
03:03I was exhausted.
03:05I hadn't slept the night before.
03:07So by the time we went to bed and we kind of processed things as a family, it was probably 1230 at night.
03:19So we got up in the morning and we were in a position where we were kind of like in limbo, not really knowing what to do next.
03:28When I woke up, I went on my phone.
03:30I somehow thought the news would just show the A-frame and how it was.
03:35But that doesn't happen.
03:37No one goes, oh, and your house is okay or not okay.
03:40That doesn't show up on the news.
03:43We just figured, you know, that having some sort of normalcy to the morning was good.
03:49So we checked out of the hotel.
03:51I texted my brother who, um, his wife is from Vernon.
03:57So we asked him for a recommendation for breakfast.
04:01Oh, man.
04:03And, uh, he told me of this great spot.
04:09Hey, what are we going to do with our stuff?
04:13It was kind of kiddy-cornered to this used bookstore.
04:18And, uh, Rebecca and the kids love bookstores and I can't stand them.
04:25I always joke I don't even know how to read.
04:28So we had breakfast and they thought, look, why don't we go over to this bookstore and
04:33we'll poke around and maybe there's a good book that they can pick up and read.
04:38So they're in there.
04:39I'm literally standing on the corner texting people madly and trying to get information.
04:45My neighbor Nathan sends me a clip of the CNN coverage.
04:53It was our A-frame, uh, engulfed in flames.
04:59That was the confirmation that the house burned down.
05:03I walked into the bookstore and I just showed the video to Rebecca.
05:10No one else knew what we were doing.
05:13Um, I took the kids outside and I sat on the bench in front.
05:18I thought they should know what's going on.
05:21And so I showed them and I think that's where their emotion came out and they were in tears.
05:33I can't consolidate for myself clearly that the place that I was sitting in yesterday morning,
05:41you know, doing the routine, getting the breakfast, all that kind of stuff is the place that was on the video on fire.
05:51It's hard for me to have those two things be the same.
05:57There was something about, like, just being around some more family.
06:00And, and so we, we decided to go and stay with Rebecca's sister and her family, uh, just outside of Calgary.
06:07So we drove there the next day and, and I think that that was the moment where we could all just take a deep breath.
06:16Honestly, I'm more upset for people who lost their homes.
06:24And, you know, when Todd comes to me and says,
06:29it's, it's all gone.
06:34I've, I feel him.
06:37I feel that.
06:39For him.
06:41It's not for me.
06:42It's for him.
06:44And, uh,
06:47I just can't imagine how it feels to be him right now.
06:50It was so impactful to see the fire chief from West Kelowna in New York, talking to the United Nations,
07:01so eloquently explaining the incredible heat and power of this fire.
07:06Four weeks ago, my community was devastated.
07:09A firefighter said to me afterwards that it was like fighting a hundred years of fire all in one night.
07:15And then strongly advocating for more preventative measures.
07:20Over $20 million was spent reacting to my fire, not to mention the insurance losses, which could be triple that.
07:27What could we have accomplished if we used that same amount of money proactively?
07:40Watching what happens when a fire travels at 50 kilometres an hour.
07:45You can read studies, you can read books, you can take courses, but there's absolutely no replacement for that experience.
07:52The entire department and the entire community has learned lessons.
07:57The hardest days weren't during the fire.
08:00The hardest days are now.
08:02When you drive through these neighbourhoods and wonder, like, why did this happen this way?
08:06And you have time to think about it and question what you did.
08:10The property burned down on August 18th.
08:16It's one month to the day and we're finally allowed back in.
08:22As we were driving along the highway and looking down into those neighbourhoods that looked sort of like the fire has come through there, this just looks way worse to me.
08:32Look at this.
08:35It looks unreal.
08:37I think this was one of the epicenters of the fire.
08:41It looks like a movie set.
08:42It does look like a movie set.
08:43It doesn't even look like this actually happened.
08:46We'd been asking when we would be able to get back in, but due to safety reasons for mainly electrical, gas lines, even damage to the road on the way out here, they wanted to make sure that everything was safe.
09:05Jesus.
09:07Oh my gosh.
09:08Look at this.
09:11It is crazy.
09:14Three years.
09:15I almost feel kind of numb to the situation and we've known for a month with a couple photos what it's going to look like.
09:36So you come out here and you're like, yeah, it kind of looks like what we saw in the picture, but at the same time, you're just like, I don't know.
09:47It's so.
09:49I think when you see it in a picture and it's this big and then when you come here and it's the size of the entire A-frame that's rolled up over there.
09:57Yeah.
09:58And like seeing that charred out fur beam.
10:02Yeah.
10:03Right along that, you can see all of the screws that we put into the TNG.
10:08Like, look at how many are in there.
10:10Yeah.
10:11And the bottom of each beam is still there.
10:14Lots of people ask me about the fur beams that actually held the whole structure up and the fact that those were wood.
10:21In order to protect them as well as we could, we'd ordered metal cladding that would clip around the beam.
10:31It was on the to-do list, but we just hadn't finished it.
10:37The whole roof.
10:39I mean, this roof was designed to ward off fire coming from above and now it's just this crinkled, twisted.
10:49Mass.
10:50It's hard to know even what to look at.
10:53I think that the fire came up underneath, essentially, and then started to burn from the inside out and create this incredible kind of kiln-like effect that made this building implode.
11:10Those little footings are the beach room?
11:13Those are all the beach room right there.
11:14Wow.
11:15If the fire came from above, we were really protected in terms of an incredible buildup of non-combustible insulation and then a metal roof on top of that.
11:26So there was good defense mechanisms from the front and the top.
11:31But this kind of underbelly, which was still exposed, we hadn't put the insulation underneath yet.
11:38We hadn't put cladding that would be non-combustible from down below.
11:41It's funny that the drywall is still sitting here.
11:44It's burnt all on one side.
11:45This is what we had left to put up.
11:47Yeah, because the drywallers were here and you were working on it and that's why this is here.
11:56I wanted to be able to see where the bunkhouse was and what it looks like now.
12:01But it's just a big hull of an A-frame roof blanketing on top of it.
12:06And really that's kind of symbolic of this whole thing.
12:09It's like this A-frame took over our lives for the past three years and it overshadowed everything.
12:17We suffered at home without Todd and Todd suffered through so many struggles.
12:23It just feels like a really big waste.
12:25The little things are upsetting to me.
12:42The details, the care and attention.
12:45The beams that were all hand sanded and stained perfectly.
12:50And the door, I didn't even put it in the door.
12:53Like it's sitting there in a box.
12:56Like that to me is just so sad.
13:02I've never dealt with this before.
13:03I don't know how it plays out.
13:06The part that sucks is that you're thinking about how you will use this space in the future.
13:13Our whole goal was to have Christmas there.
13:16And sitting in that living room and now you're like, that living room's gone.
13:19I would joke with the kids that, you know, you're never allowed to sell this.
13:24This is going to be handed down from generation to generation.
13:27And we didn't even make it through the first generation, let alone subsequent ones.
13:33The other thing that people ask is, well, the foundation's okay.
13:40But what people don't realize is that a fire that strong and it's blasting heat right down on the rock and the foundation.
13:50It dries out so quickly that the concrete spalls, which is essentially explodes and the rebar inside loses its integrity and so does the concrete.
14:01So you end up in a situation where there's a lot of question marks about whether you can even use any of that.
14:06And whether you have to literally rip it off of the rock before you would rebuild again.
14:13So it's it's easy for people to say, well, you've got to rebuild.
14:18You got to like this story is great.
14:20It's rise from the ashes.
14:21And there's a part of me that does get excited about that.
14:24But there's the other logistical part and financial part that you go, wow, this is overwhelming.
14:31Whew.
14:34Yeah, those those bits of blown glass are pretty neat, but also like so crazy.
14:40But that's what's left of the windows.
14:43I can't help but think like, how do you like approach this?
14:47Yeah. How do you figure out what to do next?
14:50I mean, OK, so you clean it up and then what?
14:52Do we even want to go back to our bay and rebuild there?
14:58Is it worth it?
15:11Forest fires for a long time were something that happened outside of communities.
15:18And they threatened assets like timber.
15:20Tens or hundreds of kilometers away from any homes.
15:24Like something changed.
15:26And now these fires are either starting inside of our communities or they're starting just outside and bearing down on them like this fire did to us.
15:36There have always been wildfires.
15:42I believe, and from the evidence that I've seen, they are acting differently.
15:48Fires are traveling faster and they're consuming more fuel per hour.
15:54There's so much rock wool here.
15:55Where was it all going?
15:56All underneath?
15:57Yeah.
15:58So having gone through the fire and it's still sitting there, if we had all that insulation in underneath, would it have protected it? I don't know.
16:12The non-combustible elements that we had incorporated already, the metal roof and the rock wool insulation, both of those are essentially still intact.
16:25It's why our site looks so messy as opposed to other sites where everything burned.
16:30I think where we're at from a climate perspective, I think we're past the point of debating whether that has an impact on what's going on around the world.
16:39Once you live through it, you watch it, you learn more about how these fires behave, why they are so devastating, why they're happening so much more frequently, it makes it much more real.
16:51The fire chief from West Kelowna said it very simply, we are taking all of our resources and time and we're fighting the wrong end of the battle.
17:01We're fighting the fire here and then we're spending all this money to rebuild through insurance, et cetera, and people's time and effort.
17:11It seems much more logical to be addressing it at the beginning, where we're building, how we're building.
17:17We're not going to fix it completely, but we could take those resources and attack the problem up front.
17:29It's interesting doing this documentary because I think it's easy to forget what happened here.
17:36All these teeny tiny details.
17:38The cabling that goes across.
17:40Oh yeah.
17:41I just put that in.
17:42Yeah, yeah.
17:43And I think, what a waste of time.
17:45This is like all of that, just perfectionism.
17:50It is such a disaster up there right now.
17:53It's a traumatic event for everybody.
17:55I mean, the problem with being here right now is that if you look out at the lake, everything feels fantastic and you remember why we bought this property and then you look up at the hillside and you think, you know, how many years does it take for the vegetation to come back?
18:10Everyone else is going to be building.
18:11Everyone else is going to be building.
18:12So there's going to be lots of construction.
18:13It's a beautiful location.
18:16And now the fire risk is reduced.
18:20There's less fuel.
18:21The reason that fire traveled as fast as it did was because there was a lot of dead fuel.
18:26Fires are natural.
18:27They're going to happen.
18:28We put ourselves in the line of that by building communities and not necessarily thinking forward as to what if that fire does happen.
18:35There's lots to consider.
18:42Yeah.
18:43We're kind of wrestling with the idea of what we might build and of course the conversations at home.
19:00We've got the kids involved.
19:03Kessa really doesn't want us to rebuild here.
19:06Very against the idea.
19:07Adamant that we don't.
19:08It'll all burn down again, he says.
19:12Which, to be fair, is a possibility.
19:16So we know we're not going to do the same thing again.
19:19That's the part we know.
19:21Are you on board with?
19:22I'm very much on board.
19:23Are you really?
19:24Absolutely.
19:25I actually thought that you were on the fence and I was trying to convince you.
19:29No, I was just worried about, I don't know.
19:32Justice feelings.
19:33Yeah, essentially.
19:34We let our children run the show.
19:37Not really.
19:38But we do take it into consideration.
19:39We consider them.
19:42I think what we do is try and capture the things that we loved about what we did last time.
19:50But not build from scratch.
19:51No.
19:52And I think that that's where prefabrication comes in.
19:55I think that that's where the world's going in terms of construction style, which is very cool.
20:00We can still embrace passive house construction, make it net zero.
20:03It kind of lessens.
20:04You can prefab it as a passive house?
20:06Oh, yeah.
20:07We're just bringing all these same people together to just look at it from a different perspective.
20:12Well, I think in the same way we embraced this concept of passive house, like high performance building,
20:17we now need to just bring in this other piece, which is resilience.
20:21I mean, it was secondary to, you know, in the way we were building it now, but it needs to be equally important.
20:30That's exciting.
20:31We like a challenge.
20:32We had so much support.
20:36We had so many messages, so many people checking in, so much kindness headed our way.
20:44It was overwhelming.
20:48This many people care?
20:50Yeah.
20:51You ready?
20:52Nice and easy.
21:03It affected.
21:04It touched a lot of people.
21:07Definitely think that Todd should rebuild.
21:09The most fun part.
21:12We as humans are very resilient, and even though there hasn't been a fire, there is always a rebirth.
21:19And some type of build needs to happen on this property.
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