Three years after a devastating wildfire nearly wiped out the picturesque B.C. hamlet of Lytton, residents say it may never be reborn because of costly, government-mandated archeological excavations.
Village Mayor Denise O’Connor — whose own house was destroyed in the June 2021 wildfire — said homeowners are getting individual quotes for archeological work that range from $26,000 to $48,000 to much higher, making the work prohibitive.
“The quotes to do archeology on one property was as high as $82,000 and he … decided, nope, I’m not coming back,” said O’Connor, who wants the provincial government to fund the digs.
“We want new people to move to Lytton. Not everybody is returning. We know that,” said O’Connor. “We need to make it a viable place. So we need people to move here. We need to rebuild.”
The archeological digs are made necessary by the village’s location on a historic Indigenous site, as per B.C.’s Heritage Conservation Act (HCA). Lytton is comprised of a one-time hub for gold miners dating to 1858 and the surrounding Lytton First Nation community.
A total of five families currently live in Lytton; O’Connor said the cost of mandated archeology is preventing a rebirth.
The village was once home to 250 people, but only two homes remained after the 2021 fire. Only about 15 families are currently rebuilding now that the land is finally ready for reconstruction, after nearly three years of delays due to the clearance of debris, burned soil, and the recovery of archeological artifacts.
However, for Denise and the owners of around 90 other properties, the burden of archeological excavation falls on them.
The mayor, for instance, has to pay $45,000 to rebuild her basement. She says that the excavation will take place in an area that was already dug out and refilled. The initial archeological work plan cost her $1,300, and from that plan, the estimated cost of the actual archeological work was determined.
“They quoted me $45,000,” O’Connor told National Post.
Lytton’s village council granted a six-month contract to the consulting firm A.E.W. Limited Partnership in March 2022 to oversee archeological and heritage monitoring during the debris removal and soil remediation process.
A.E.W., established in 2017 by the Nlaka’pamux Nation Tribal Council, employs monitors from the Lytton First Nation to oversee excavations, ensuring debris is carefully sifted for items of archeological significance.
Any construction project may require an HCA permit. There are 62,000 archeological sites registered in B.C., 90 per cent of which are of First Nation origin, according to a B.C. government website, but even unrecorded sites may need one.
According to the mayor, the village has already spent $5 million on archeology funded by the province.
“What we don’t understand as a community and as the people of the village is why, when we spent $5 million already on archeology, do we have to do all this detailed archeology again,” she said. “It is not covered by insurance and it’s just not in anyone’s policy. And there’s no money from government or anywhere to pay for it.”
The slow progress has sparked frustration and uncertainty, leading to protests last year by residents, including O’Connor.
She says Premier David Eby ignored several requests for a meeting to discuss possible financial help, and his office only responded after she called a news conference.
“I met with the premier…. Basically, he said, ‘Well, you know, we share your concerns.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, they would be working on it,’” she said, adding that she later met with the forestry minister — under whose department the archeology branch falls — and his message was that they would be looking at legislative changes to the branch.
“It’s affecting people that aren’t going to come back and they want to sell their property. People are going to say, why would I buy that property? If there’s all these archeology and costs associated with it, I’ll go to some other town and buy a property.”
Eby’s office referred the Post to the NDP communications team, because a provincial election is underway. The party provided a transcribed comment from Eby from a scrum with journalists weeks earlier.
“I share her concerns and her anxieties about the pace of rebuilding in her community. There’s some really good stuff that’s happening there,” Eby said, according to the transcript. “That new grocery store is beginning construction, people are rebuilding their homes, but there are absolute frustrations, and understandably so, about the fact that this community burned down on top of an historic Indigenous site and there are obligations around archeology that are being borne by individual homeowners that’s really interfering with their ability to rebuild.”
The NDP says the province has given almost $41 million to the village, which includes funding for the re-establishment of essential infrastructure and services like water treatment and sewer infrastructure, municipal services and staffing; and debris removal, soil remediation and the required archeology work.
Mark Milke, president of the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy, a Calgary think-tank, said it seems beyond the pale that homeowners should have to bear the cost for expensive and burdensome government regulation.
“Housing costs are already expensive in Canada, and to reconstruct Lytton with archeological costs billed to the owner, people trying to reconstruct their homes, is a burden that they shouldn’t have to bear,” he told National Post.
“Either the province, through the tax base, should fund the archeological digs that they want, or they should forego the requirement that archeological digs be required.”
O’Connor is a retired school principal who says she ran for mayor in November 2022 after urging from other villagers.
The mayor works from her parents’ home, because the municipal offices were also destroyed in the fire. Lytton has a temporary village office in a sawmill two kilometres from town.
She had first learned of the fire that destroyed her home on social media. Temperatures had soared to about 45 degrees Celsius, and her curtains were drawn as dinnertime approached.
“I went outside to look, and sure enough, there was unbelievable fire, smoke,” she recalled. “It was very windy that day, coming my direction, all the embers.”
She immediately took her husband, who uses a wheelchair, to the car, grabbed a few belongings and joined others fleeing north. She remembered turning around a couple of times to look back at her village.
“The fire was coming and it was coming along the railway tracks, it was coming in on the mountains,” she said.
“I would describe, like I’ve never seen an atomic bomb go off, but that’s what it felt like. Looking back toward the town was the cloud, this huge mushroom — smoked, black embers.”
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