The owner of a small farm, animal sanctuary and music venue says he has lost everything in the Summerland, B.C., wildfire.

Craig Milton said they were at home on Friday night when they heard about a fire at Crump Recreation site, which is close to Faulder.

“We thought, oh, geez, that’s close,” Milton said.

“But it’s about 15 km off. So we weren’t in a panic or anything and it’s a bit north, so we thought we would be OK. We couldn’t, from our perspective, the fire was behind us. So we actually couldn’t see it.”

He said it wasn’t long after they saw cars, trailers and emergency vehicles going past and helicopters flying over.

“So by then, Faulder was burning, I think,” he said.

“And so, yeah, you pretty quickly got to realize that we’re in a serious situation here. So we kind of got into protection mode for our animals. We knew that evacuating would be tricky, but initially we just wanted to make sure they had water and food, sprinklers on.”

Milton said they have a small animal sanctuary as they rescue retired goats, sheep, ducks and chickens.

“So the fortunate thing was our paddocks are nice green pastures, no coniferous trees, no combustible materials in there,” he said.

“So we wouldn’t have had time to remove them anyway; it all happened so fast.”

They decided to leave them there and hope for the best and Milton said all the animals survived.

At the same time, he said they were prepping for a concert that was set to take place on Saturday night with about 100 guests and musicians from New York.

“I had to call them and say, ‘I don’t think this is happening,'” Milton added.

“And literally by the time we even got the basics of getting ready, we’d had no alerts, no warnings. By then, hundreds of vehicles or hundreds of people and tons of vehicles are flying by. And we barely got sort of a bag packed for ourselves.”

Milton said the fire was right behind them as they fled.

“As we drove away, we could see in our rear view mirror the fire cresting the mountain. It was that close and that fast. There was no time to do anything more than the bit that we put in.”

The Bald Range wildfire grew to 5,000 hectares quickly on Friday night.

Many homes and structures have been lost in the flames, including Milton’s home and music venue, which were the only major structures lost in that area, Milton said.

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“It must’ve just been, an ember landed,” he said.

“It was an old house, farmhouse. You know, vinyl siding. It probably went up pretty fast. And then the buildings were all in close proximity to one another and so it probably didn’t take very long.”

Milton said they were able to grab some personal items, but not much. He grabbed some pictures and work-related items and a guitar his wife gave him a few years ago.

“But really, everything else is gone,” he said.

“You know, when you think about it afterwards, it’s like there were so many things that were right there. My bag wasn’t even full. I could have, I have a huge collection of writings and poetry from my grandmother who passed years ago. And it’s just two binders sitting right there; I could’ve just thrown them in.”

However, they had autographed instruments, posters, thousands of vinyls and a stereo and sound system in their music venue and that is all gone.

“Everything’s been erased,” he said.

Milton said it hit them suddenly how much their lives changed that night.

“You went to go to make coffee. We don’t have a coffee maker anymore. We don’t have — we had to run and drive to buy some utensils to have supper,” he said.

“Right now I don’t own a pair of pants. I have a friend who gave me, donated me some stuff, but it’s hard to get your head around that when you’ve got a lifetime of things and you’re comfortable and your kids are grown and gone and you think you’re OK.

“And then it just gets erased in such a brief moment.”