KelownaNow’s 2023 newsmaker of the year: West Kelowna fire chief Jason Brolund

During the summer of 2003, Jason Brolund was battling tirelessly on the frontlines of the historical Okanagan Mountain Park wildfire.

Two decades later, nearly to the day, he was involved in the same type of fight, but in a very different role.

Now the fire chief in West Kelowna, Brolund said his experience in 2003, under the leadership of then Kelowna fire chief Gerry Zimmermann, helped shape how he led the multi-jurisdictional battle against Central Okanagan wildfires in August.

“Those types of hard-fought lessons are ones that you’d be crazy to ignore,” Brolund told KelownaNow during an in depth interview after he was chosen as our newsmaker of the year for 2023.

Given the nature of his leadership this summer, it comes as no surprise that Brolund was humble and quick to credit others when informed of the honour.

It’s something he did several times over the course of our discussion and it's a perfect example of why he became the face of what he calls “the most complex fire” our region has ever faced.

The McDougall Creek wildfire was miniscule when it sparked several kilometres behind West Kelowna on Tuesday, Aug. 15, and most people were more concerned with the giant plume of smoke coming from the Keremeos area.

“We started to hear about a fire burning behind our community and, initially, the outlook was pretty optimistic from the BC Wildfire Service (BCWS) about being able to catch it before it got large,” Brolund told KelownaNow.

But a positive outlook only means so much when Mother Nature decides to add constant, significant winds to the fray.

In a backcountry stricken by drought, the fire moved several kilometres toward West Kelowna on Thursday, Aug. 17, and quickly pushed its way into neighbourhoods.

As a mass evacuation was underway, day turned to night and the sheer scale, intensity and destructive power of the wildfire became painfully apparent.

Over the course of several hours, the fire destroyed dozens of homes on the Westside and even jumped over Okanagan Lake to create two new wildfires in Kelowna and Lake Country.

As the seconds, minutes and hours ticked away toward sunrise on Friday, and with the devastation in Maui from a week earlier fresh in his mind, Brolund feared the worst.

"My biggest concern that morning (Friday) was for loss of life. At the time, certainly, I didn't express that purposefully, but it was my greatest fear,” he told KelownaNow.

“For that to pass and not to happen is a testament to literally thousands of people, including the evacuees themselves who listened and got out of the way."

It’s understandable that Brolund put on a brave face and didn’t express those fears to the public at that moment, but there wasn’t much that he kept to himself.

During daily briefings that he and other fire chiefs and officials held every morning, Brolund prided himself in being as raw, open and honest as he was able to be.

“I was given the opportunity to talk to the public and to be frank with them. Nobody handed me speaking points. I got to go out and say what happened,” he explained.

“The information I got to share wasn’t filtered through five or six different people and was 24 hours old by the time I shared it. It was stuff I heard driving over to the media conference.”

It was that method of communication, which you don’t always see in an age of heightened public relations, that endeared Brolund to the public and helped so many residents navigate the most difficult days of their lives.

“When you ask people to do major things like evacuate, they expect to see the same person at a set time providing them with the information they need,” added Brolund.

In one of his final media briefings, days after the fire began, Brolund made a comment that stuck out to many about needing to share a beer with his firefighters to talk about what they had seen.

He said those conversations are still happening to some degree.

“There are a thousand stories out there and many of them still haven’t been told,” he noted. “Every time I sit down with my staff, I’m hearing about some incredible thing that they did in order to help the community through this.”

When asked what sticks out most to him four months after the fact, he said he’ll never forget the “devastating” feeling of hearing that firefighters and police officers were trapped by fire.

In the position he was in as fire chief, however, there wasn’t a lot he could do about it at the time other than ensure all obstacles were out of the way so they could be rescued.

“At that point it was up to the equipment and the training they had been provided to deal with that situation,” Brolund said. “It wasn’t easy waiting for those updates.”

But that’s not to say he didn’t get his hands dirty like he did in 2003 and he spoke specifically of the first night when he was finally relieved in the command post to go get a few hours of much-needed sleep.

He said he drove by one neighbourhood on his way home to get his own eyes on the situation, but ended up staying and going to work alongside the men and women on the ground.

“There was no other option,” he said. “To be able to stand beside them and fight that fire on the ground are scenes in my mind I’ll never forget.”

Brolund also mentioned public works employees putting sprinklers on the outside of buildings to save them and, when they ran out of sprinklers, heading home to get their own.

He cited RCMP officers going above and beyond to get stranded families out of burning neighbourhoods and, when needed, using garden hoses to fight off flames that were encroaching on homes.

Beaming with pride for his community, Brolund said that he thinks the actions of so many people in tumultuous times showed a lot about the Central Okanagan.

“I don’t think you’d find that everywhere, but we found it here and it made a really huge difference,” he noted.

In the same sense, Brolund said he didn’t anticipate what came after the fire and the continued outpouring of support from the public.

“I can't really go anywhere without someone recognizing me and stopping me and wanting to pass along their thanks. The most difficult thing for me is in turn trying to pass that thanks along to the people who really deserve it,” Brolund explained.

“It's the chief officer below me, it's the firefighters below me, it's the firefighters that came from across the province, and across the country, and across the globe, to West Kelowna."

While it comes as no surprise that Brolund continues to praise the army of professionals he worked alongside this summer, he said there’s another behind-the-scenes group that deserves all the credit in the world.

“None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the families. My family and the families of our firefighters,” the fire chief mentioned. “We couldn't have gone and done the things that we did if it wasn't for our families taking care of business at home.”

While people worked excruciatingly long hours, their families dealt with the stresses of life in an emergency essentially on their own, which for many meant an evacuation.

And for some, including half of the North Westside Fire Department team and their chief, it included the loss of their home.

"It was just what it took to get the job done, but we wouldn't have been able to do that if it wasn't for our families taking care of things,” said Brolund.

Unsurprisingly, life has changed significantly for Brolund since mid-August and he takes responsibility upon himself to share the community’s story for a variety of reasons.

Brolund and others played host to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Vancouver Canucks captain Quinn Hughes in the aftermath of the fire, and he called both visits a big boost for his department.

Canucks Captain Quinn Hughes and team executives visited the West Kelowna Fire Department to show appreciation for their extraordinary efforts to protect their community.

Thanks to #Canucks fans’ bids during the Wildfire auction, topped up by team ownership and the… pic.twitter.com/5iIg7slCjV

— Vancouver Canucks (@Canucks) September 15, 2023

“The fire hall has never been cleaner than when the Canucks visited,” Brolund noted with a chuckle. “The guys were very excited about that.”

A few weeks after those visits, Brolund was called by Trudeau and invited to New York to speak at the United Nations’ conference on climate change.

He called it “a career highlight for any fire chief.”

Brolund has also recently been to Ottawa as part of a delegation from the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs to seek more federal support to prevent another record-breaking wildfire season in the future.

Just a few days after his trip to Ottawa, Brolund was in Vancouver to take part in the Canucks' Firefighters' Night and the introduction of Team 43.

“These are all things that I never anticipated would come from this situation, but I would never pass up the opportunity to talk about the hard work of everyone,” he said.

Knowing how much the response to the McDougall Creek wildfire benefitted from lessons learned in 2003, he added that he’ll take any opportunity to share the lessons learned this year.

After the Okanagan Mountain Park wildfire in 2003, Gerry Zimmermann became a national hero of sorts and began to be tugged in several different directions.

People were calling for him to run for office – as mayor of Kelowna, a city councillor, an MLA or even an MP.

Eventually, after retiring as fire chief in 2005, he ran for council in 2011 and topped Kelowna’s polls with 18,857 votes, but it was a one-and-done term before he trotted back into retirement.

When asked if he is feeling similar pressures to his fire chief from 20 years ago, Brolund said he “gets phone calls every day to do any number of different things.”

Simply put, the leader of West Kelowna Fire Rescue said it would take something incredibly special to drag him away from the important role he holds today.

“I have one of the best jobs on the face of the Earth. I get to lead a team of professionals who just want to be at work doing very difficult, very challenging things,” he said.

“But I also get to be here serving the community where I grew up and where my family lives today. So it’s not easy to pry me away from the job I have the pleasure of having today.”

Be sure to also check out KelownaNow's business of the year and athlete of the year!