Everyone says Lytton was a beautiful place to live. The small Canadian town sits at the confluence of two rivers and was built on one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America—the Nlaka’pamux people have called it home for more than 10,000 years. About 250 people lived in the Lytton of the recent past, on a few cross streets and several dozen lots—you could take it in all in one breath. One blistering June evening in 2021, a wildfire burned through the entire place, and the neighboring Lytton First Nation.
Patrick Michell, the former chief of a nearby Nlaka’pamux community, was at the band office when he got a succession of texts from his wife in the span of minutes: Somebody just called and said Lytton is burning. Then, Our reserve is on fire, and then: Our house is on fire. After that, the cell service cut out. In the hours that followed, roughly 1,000 people were evacuated; two people died. Ninety percent of the town of Lytton was destroyed, as were dozens of homes and community buildings across Lytton First Nation. The hundreds of residents who lost their homes scattered across British Columbia.
Less than a week after the blaze, the province’s then-premier, John Horgan, pledged his government’s support to help Lytton rebuild as a “town of tomorrow,” more resilient to future climate-change challenges. More than two years later, that tomorrow still hasn’t arrived. The first residential-building permit was issued last month, and the town had remained under a state of local emergency until June, which meant that residents were prohibited from setting foot there. The plan that the village council initially offered—to become a model of minimizing carbon emissions—wasn’t the plan that many residents wanted, either. They didn’t want to live in the town of tomorrow. They just wanted to come home.
This idea of rebuilding to meet the climate of the future is becoming conventional wisdom among disaster-recovery experts, and it makes sense: What were once record-breaking weather events are becoming routine. So why wouldn’t we want to prepare for the worst-case scenario while building back in ways that don’t make the problem worse? The day before the fire, Lytton’s temperature had crept to 121.3 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest ever recorded in Canada; high winds and a once-in-10,000-year heat dome, virtually impossible without human-caused climate change, helped create the tinderboxlike conditions for the town’s quick and near-total devastation. This summer, Canada endured its worst wildfire season ever, with the most land burned in the country’s recorded history. More than 6,700 blazes have burned roughly 45.7 million acres of land—an area larger than Washington State—and even now, in December, more than 200 fires are burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre. In August, multiple fires burned across British Columbia, surrounding Lytton First Nation and the village. Nearly 200,000 Canadians were placed under an evacuation order this year and 30,000 in British Columbia alone this summer; some members of Lytton First Nation who fled in 2021 were forced to evacuate yet again.
As these fires burned, Canada wrestled with the limits of its disaster-response approach. Without a national body akin to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S., Canada’s patchwork approach involves the military and three levels of government on a case-by-case basis, with the affected locality usually taking the lead. “In Canada, we’re not going to have somebody thousands of miles away tell me how to fix my community,” Paul Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, in Canada, told me. Historically, recovery after flooding or wildfire has also been more reliant on the private sector. There’s an expectation that the pockets of affected homeowners will get what they need through their insurance, Sara Shneiderman, a professor of anthropology and public policy and a co-lead of the Disaster Resilience Research Network at the University of British Columbia, told me: “But because of climate change, we’re seeing that it can be this mass-scale devastation, which means you need a very different kind of approach.”
In Canada, disaster recovery is flexible by design, but flexibility, as Lytton learned, can look like having no plan at all. Many people lost their home, their pets, and anything they were unable to take with them at a moment’s notice. The year of the fire, a third of Lytton’s residents were 65 and older, likely retired and living on fixed incomes, and less than half of the town was adequately insured. Most of the town’s infrastructure and services burned. Lytton also lost its governance records, bylaws, and policies when its server and backup server burned. A model that focuses on local knowledge and autonomy, Kovacs admitted, wasn’t well suited for a town where “nobody had a home, and nobody could get to work—there was no one to do it.”
Everything that had given Lytton its charm before the fire had now become a liability. Lytton’s mayor, its small staff, and the small village council, elected uncontested and used to handling wastewater treatment and other day-to-day issues, were ill-equipped to deal with high-level crisis communications or to reconstruct a town. What’s more, Lytton was broke—its tiny tax base had been decimated and could not fund the removal of toxic dirt and debris, let alone a complete rebuild. Bringing in consultants, experts, and construction workers to help with the recovery was a challenge too, in part because of the town’s small size and relative isolation, and because of the remote area’s limited accommodations. On top of all of this, not long after the fire, heavy rains, atmospheric floods, and snowstorms left many of the region’s main arteries impassable for extended periods.
Lytton was on its own. The provincial government provided initial recovery funding, but for months, the only support offered to residents was a $2,000 payout. As the council struggled behind closed doors to come up with a plan, residents saw little opportunity to offer input. After months of pressure from their constituents, the council asked for more direct support from the province; in October 2021, the town finally announced a short-term recovery plan and hired a recovery team using provincial money. In December 2021, residents started getting $1,300 a month for interim housing.
But within a month of the fire—without officially consulting the community—the mayor had already announced to the media that Lytton would be rebuilt as a carbon-neutral town. Residents were mystified and infuriated in equal measure. “It would be fine to do something like this if you were planning a brand-new subdivision,” Denise O’Connor, a lifelong Lytton resident and a former school principal, told me in October 2022. “But when you’re in a disaster, it doesn’t make sense … There’s been zero sense of urgency for the people.”
The initial plans required residents to rebuild their homes to net-zero standards for heating and cooling. The council also considered installing power lines belowground to minimize fire risk, as well as solar sidewalks—hardened solar panels fitted into sidewalks—and wind turbines to power municipal buildings. When I asked Jan Polderman, who was mayor at the time, what prompted this decision, he told me the council had looked at the available provincial and federal grant funding, and seen money for sustainable and net-zero initiatives. “Working towards being net-zero and fire-resilient—obviously, after that type of fire, that’s a pretty high priority—was the best route to go for the next 100 years,” Polderman said. Plus, because the city of Vancouver is aiming to require net-zero buildings by 2032, “we pitched the [provincial] government to use Lytton as a test model… so that by the time Vancouver and Kelowna have to go net-zero, they have proven technology to use,” he told me. The council had a nice story to tell about the long-term benefits of building back better from a devastating climate disaster. But all residents heard was that it was going to take far longer to move home.
Some of their neighbors were already rebuilding. Tricia Thorpe and her husband lost everything in the fire, but because their farm was located outside Lytton proper, they were exempt from the village’s rebuilding rules. “It’s a silver lining that we fell through the cracks. Otherwise, we’d still be waiting to rebuild,” Thorpe told me. They weren’t insured, so they relied on crowdfunding, donations, and volunteer labor. “We’re trying to be as energy efficient and fire resistant as we can,” Thorpe said. The property’s electrical lines run underground from a stand-alone shed to the house; the house and the barn have cement cladding, metal siding, and metal roofs to improve fire resistance; sprinklers cover their property’s southeast side, the direction from which another fire would most likely blow in. They put in a heat pump, have radiant floor heating, and are planning to get solar panels as soon as they can afford them.
Meanwhile, a major chunk of federal and provincial funding for Lytton took until 2022 to come through; the federal government launched its homeowner grant program only this past May. People in the Lytton area can apply for grants of $10,000 toward rebuilding to fire-resilient standards and, depending on home size, about $84,000 to rebuild to net-zero standards—using solar panels or better-insulated walls and roofs, as well as thicker, more airtight windows.
It’s a good policy in principle, Ali Asgary, a professor of disaster and emergency management at Toronto’s York University, told me: “We want to rebuild in a way that buildings and infrastructure receive less damage and cause no death during future similar events.” But the net-zero requirements go beyond that—and some in Lytton struggle to see why they have to jump through these extra hoops to get help. “Sure, it might be a positive thing to be a model community that helps plan for others in the future,” Shneiderman, of the Disaster Resilience Research Network, said. “But that’s not necessarily serving the needs of the people who are actually there.”
In the months following the fire, lacking information and any sense of when they’d be back home, residents grew discontented. Some, like Thorpe, believe that the plans for Lytton to become carbon neutral were a PR move more than anything else. One council member resigned; recovery managers came and went. On Facebook, people shared what little information they had and vented. After uproar from residents, the council softened some of the other proposed green-building regulations; any official talk of solar sidewalks stopped. But by then, it was too late—goodwill had been lost. In large part because of her frustration with the net-zero standards, O’Connor ran for mayor, and won.
A big problem with the current net-zero grants, she told me, is the number of boxes residents must tick to qualify—you can’t meet just some of the requirements; it’s all or nothing. And because most of the federal grant money would only be paid at the end of the rebuild, some people are forgoing the grants, O’Connor told me. In December 2023, a Canadian insurer, in partnership with the federal government, did offer to advance residents the money to rebuild to fire-resilient and net-zero standards. But this process has gone on for long enough that some people have already decided against moving back to town at all. When the village council polled former residents this past April, before the announcement of the federal and insurance funding, 65 percent of households that had relocated planned on moving back to Lytton. And although 60 percent said that they would rebuild to fire-resilient standards, only 13 percent were planning to rebuild with net-zero standards in mind.
For two years, Lytton was an eerie collection of signifiers that a town once thrived here: cracked sidewalks and intact metal fences; the bones of a concrete building that had once been a health clinic; a small cemetery that was still recognizable; a set of burnt, misshapen plastic Adirondack chairs on someone’s lawn. As recently as this fall, recovery workers were still clearing debris, cleaning the soil of toxins, and working to uncover thousands of Indigenous artifacts, including a 7,500-year-old spear point, copper grave goods, tools, and red ochre wrapped in birch bark, which was central to ancestral burials—another stumbling block along the long road to the Lytton of tomorrow. As of this writing, no homes have been built.
In contrast to the town of Lytton, the neighboring Lytton First Nation’s recovery has moved more swiftly. Its losses were less total than the village’s, and it works directly with Indigenous Services Canada, which has separate funding. Although many still feel that the Lytton First Nation recovery is lacking, last summer, the Nation set up temporary housing, which meant that Michell—now Lytton First Nation’s rebuild director—and others were able to come home while they waited to rebuild on their lots. Their rebuilding plan includes a mix of prefab homes and homes made of wood and constructed on-site, with a focus on climate resilience, done their own way. They are cognizant of fire: This summer, Michell, still living in temporary housing on Lytton First Nation and told that he could have to evacuate for nearby fires at any moment, was out every day, cutting his neighbours’ grass, making sure everything was as fire safe as it could be. He called himself a climate refugee. “Three years of wildfire-evacuation alerts and orders in Lytton, and I’m still here,” he told me. He plans on staying, but part of him wonders how many more hits this place can take—and what the Lytton of the future could look like for his grandchildren.