Summerland’s Lori Stewart is in limbo between trying to help her neighbours and reeling from the Bald Range wildfire herself.

Stewart is the president of the Critteraid animal sanctuary, and said she’s trying to do everything she can to help people returning to the community following the evacuation. She’s trying to facilitate donations for people while also doing what she can for Summerland’s animals.

“I went through the whole thing with my own home, with my own farm and with the animals,” she said. “I still want to know how I can help.”

Critteraid has a thrift store along with the animal sanctuary so Stewart is setting up a system to help facilitate donations for the foreseeable future for folks who have lost their homes.

“We’re gonna call it our neighbour-to-neighbour recovery list. What we’re trying to do is let affected residents tell us what they need and then to allow the public to offer specific items. Then it prevents everyone from being overwhelmed by calls and messages and unsuitable donations,” she said.

She said displaced people will be anonymized and their needs categorized by urgency and people can drop off donations at the thrift store.

“So immediate need versus three months down the road, six months, one year. This is long-term,” she said. “People want to help and our community is amazing so it comes in droves. (Evacuees) might not be ready for it yet, they’re still reeling.”

Stewart said she’s also doing what she can to help house animals, replace feed lost in the fire and facilitate connections in the community to support farmers and animal owners.

“We’ve opened up a couple of pastures…. We have a network of people that are talking saying ‘I’ve got feed, I have this, we can help here,’” Stewart said. “There’s a number of us that are helping out with displacement while they rebuild.”

There were more than 100 animals at the sanctuary when the fire came through the community and around 40 were unable to be evacuated because of illnesses and other reasons. Stewart had to stay behind with the animals at the farm which was fortunately untouched by the blaze.

“It was very much a moment-by-moment strategy. The rescue and wildfire people knew where we were and understood what we were doing and it was absolutely strategic, one eyeball in one direction, one foot on the pedal kind of deal,” she said.

Stewart said people came together to give the animals from the sanctuary a safe place to go.

Now that the community’s human residents are back, the furry residents of Critteraid are back on the farm.

“The horses, the cats, they’re all back. . . It was such a good feeling,” she said. “They were safe and sound.”

She said the sanctuary had a detailed evacuation plan with contingencies in place, but the Bald Range fire was so unprecedented and unexpected that everyone is reevaluating how they plan for wildfires.

“For our organization, you’re responsible for evacuating over a hundred animals and without panic and without distress. There were some wins, there’s also going back to the drawing board now and saying yeah this needs to be improved on. We thought of plans A, B and C. We didn’t think up to W, X, Y and Z,” she said.

Click here for the Critteraid website and Facebook.