BURSTA B.C. woman is aiming to better coordination when it comes to livestock evacuations after experiencing the chaos first hand while answering calls for help during the Bradley Creek and Bald Range wildfires in the Okanagan this August.
Coldstream’s Meagan Bucar drove into the fire zone when the Bradley Creek wildfire broke out at the north end of Okanagan Lake after a woman had put out a call for help in rescuing her horses. Bucar responded to the request to drive in with her horse trailer in hopes of evacuating the animals, or at least open the gates to the pen.
“When I arrived there were five, maybe six other trucks there with trailers,” Bucar said the horses were being dealt with and she wasn’t needed due to the number of people who answered the call for help.
Bucar said she didn’t know who the others were and in the emergent situation, she didn’t ask anyone for their contact information.
With the horses safe, Bucar led the convoy of trucks and trailers out of the fire zone and into Vernon.
And then a second call came from someone with over 30 animals needing to be evacuated.
“She was literally across the neighbourhood that we were just in. By then they had fully shut the highway down, so there was no way to get to her,” Bucar told Black Press Media.
A week later, on Aug. 7, the Bald Range wildfire sparked near Faulder and Summerland. Bucar received about 13 calls for rescues.
“In the back of my head I’m like, ‘Is there anyone in Kelowna? This is about an hour-and-a-half drive for me. There’s got to be somebody in Kelowna that has a trailer that could help out and get there sooner.'”
Bucar started the drive for a rescue of 22 horses in Summerland. Upon reaching Peachland, she learned the property had burned, but the animals had been rescued.
Instead, Bucar made her way into the fire zone for a different rescue of some thoroughbreds, but when trying to get back out, she discovered the wildfire had crossed the highway north of the community and the road was closed, forcing the realtor and mom to take the long route home.
“I didn’t get home until about 7:30 a.m. in the morning,” Bucar said. “I had a two-hour nap and I woke up and I just thought, ‘We need an app for this.’”
Bucar said she knows of a program for large cattle herds, Premise ID, but said there isn’t a lot of education for hobby farmers on emergency preparedness.
Wasting no time, Bucar started reaching out to tech companies for assistance in building an app. A Kelowna company, Sixth Summit, responded to the call and offered their help at no cost.
“I think I started to cry. I couldn’t believe it. I was actually expecting to pay for it.”
By Wednesday, Aug. 12, Bucar said they had a working prototype.
The app, Livestock Coordination Network, allows users to set up a profile as a livestock owner, a hauler, a boarding host or an emergency coordinator ahead of an emergency.
Animal owners can include the type and number of animals they have and, when an evacuation is necessary, they can activate an SOS call for help on the app.
“If you’re setting up a property, you’ll put in your address exactly as RCMP would need it and then you pin the location on the map,” explained Bucar. “We’ve integrated in the backend a live fire map that pulls from BC Wildfire [Service] and you can pin your location on it, like how close you are to an alert or an order zone.”
Animal owners can also include pictures and access notes for haulers, like where the gates are and if any animals are more difficult to transport.
“Simple things that, if you’re reading it at 2 a.m. in the morning, you’re going to be able to understand,” Bucar said.
Haulers are able to input the type of animal they are able to transport and what kind of trailers they own.
Boarding hosts can set up a profile to state what kind of animal they are able to care for on their property and the style of pen.
In the event of an emergency, the SOS activation will send an app notification and a text message to haulers within 75 kilometres of the request location that match the animal type of the animal owner.
“If the SOS can’t send because there’s poor service expected and there’s no data connection, it continues to retry automatically until that signal returns,” Bucar added.
Haulers can accept the request and are sent a pin of the location of the request. An emergency coordinator will work on the back end to ensure there are no duplicate requests or responses and confirm the number and species of animals needing to be rescued, making evacuations as efficient as possible.
“It’s not to replace any rescue, any organization,” explained Bucar. “It is truly there to be a tool for everybody to use, so that we have an idea of where everyone is and who is calling for help.”
Bucar said this will allow for everyone needing assistance to be helped while maintaining safety for both the public and firefighters.
“We don’t need firefighters wasting resources. For example, watering down a highway for me when I wasn’t needed,” said Bucar, who explained that firefighters sprayed down the roads to allow her to get through to the Bradley Creek wildfire area only to find the horses she went to rescue were already dealt with.
The app will also include information regarding access permits for wildfire zones.
“We do not want haulers unnecessarily going into areas where they haven’t been granted a permit yet. This is dampering our resources again when you’ve got a bunch of people lined up at these roadblocks wanting to get in and they don’t have a permit.”
The app will be free for everyone and will service the entirety of B.C. Bucar is now waiting on Google Play and Apple to give approval and officially launch the app.
“It sounds complicated, but we’ve kept it really simple,” Bucar explained. “When you’re in a crisis, I don’t want anyone to be overwhelmed with information.”
More information about the app can be found be visiting livestockcoordinationnetwork.com.