The Black Vault - Raging Canada Wildfire Forces 10,000 to Flee Homes

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A raging wildfire has forced as many as 10,000 people from their homes in suburban Kelowna, British Columbia, in what has become one of Western Canada's worst fire seasons in decades.

Emergency officials in Canada's westernmost province said on Friday it was their "worst-case scenario" when a 13,000-hectare (32,000-acre) fire burning south of the city suddenly jumped a containment line and pushed into a neighborhood of expensive and often newly built homes on Thursday night.

Although many residents of the prosperous, vacation city of 96,000 had been on high alert about the possibility of evacuations, many of those forced to flee were told they had only minutes to leave by police who went door to door.

No deaths or injuries were reported, but local news reports said that as many as 20 homes may have been damaged or destroyed by the flames.

Even before the evacuations in Kelowna an estimated 2,000 people in the southern interior region of British Columbia had been forced from their homes by several large fires that have burned out of control. The mountainous area has seen little rainfall for several weeks. The fire outside Kelowna, in the Okanagan region, about 185 miles east of Vancouver, began on Aug. 16 with a lightning strike in the nearby mountains.

The Okanagan region is home to Western Canada's wine industry, and the fire has forced the closure of at least one winery, although it is believed no structures were destroyed.

Wind conditions were reported to be light on Friday morning which would aid efforts to control the blaze, but residents were worried by forecasts that called for winds to pick up later in the day and possibility of thunderstorms.

Since April 1, more than 1,600 square kilometers (630 square miles) of forest have burned in British Columbia, which is currently under a provincial state of emergency. More than 800 fires are currently burning across the province.

Residents have been warned to stay out of forests and off wilderness roads in the southern half of the province, which is Canada's third largest and roughly the size of France and Germany combined.

The extent of the fire danger was also demonstrated on Thursday by a crash on the TransCanada Highway in which a truck hit a power pole, sparking another fire, which was still out of control on Friday morning.

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