Fire Season Hits the Highways

Summer in British Columbia has a second calendar now, and it is written in smoke. While most of the country marks the season by long weekends and patio weather, anyone who moves freight through this province watches a different set of dates: the day the drought codes climb, the day the first big fire blows up near a highway, and the day a corridor that thousands of trucks depend on simply closes. In 2026 that last day has already arrived, and the season has barely started.

This past weekend an out-of-control wildfire near Lytton shut down a long stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway, the kind of closure that reroutes hundreds of trucks and reminds every dispatcher in the Lower Mainland how fragile the map really is. With BC Wildfire Service warning that the province is heading into summer on drier ground than it had before some of its worst fire years, this is the moment to understand what fire season does to freight, what a closure really costs, and how a carrier plans around a hazard that gives almost no notice.

Fire Season Has Already Reached the Highway

On Friday, June 19, the Saw Creek wildfire was discovered roughly three kilometres south of Lytton, the village that was famously destroyed by fire in 2021. It grew fast. By the weekend it was being reported in the range of 600 to 700 hectares, out of control, with an incident management team, more than 130 BC Wildfire Service personnel and several helicopters assigned to it. Evacuation orders covered dozens of properties and two Lytton First Nation reserves, with many more on alert, and an air quality advisory hung over the valley.

For freight, the headline was the road. The fire forced the closure of Highway 1, the Trans-Canada, for about 116 kilometres between Boston Bar and Ashcroft. That is not a back road. It is one of the main arteries linking the Lower Mainland to the BC Interior and the rest of the country, and with it shut, traffic was pushed onto Highway 5, the Coquihalla, and Highway 97C. This was not even the first Coquihalla scare of the year. Back in late January a wildfire closed Highway 5 between Hope and Merritt, and in April a semi-trailer caught fire on the Coquihalla and ignited a roadside blaze that closed the highway in both directions. The fire season and the freight season now overlap for months.

Why 2026 Is Starting on Dangerous Ground

One early fire is a headline. The bigger concern is the setup behind it. In its Summer 2026 Seasonal Outlook, released June 16, BC Wildfire Service warned that the province is entering this summer in drought conditions worse than those going into 2017, 2018 and 2021, three of the most severe fire years on record, and that the rainfall needed to reverse that is considered unlikely. Snowpack across the province sat at roughly 64 percent of normal on June 1, well below usual across the Southern Interior and South Coast.

The forecast points the same direction: a near certainty of warmer and drier than average conditions, with fire activity expected to peak through July and August. The agency flagged the Chilcotin, Lower Thompson, Okanagan, Vancouver Island and the Northeast as among the highest-risk regions. In plain terms, the fuel is dry, the snow that normally keeps the high country wet into summer is mostly gone, and the worst weeks are still ahead. For anyone planning freight through the Interior, that is a long runway of risk, not a single bad weekend.

It also helps to see how violently BC fire seasons swing from year to year. A quiet spring tells you very little about what August will bring, which is exactly why a contingency plan beats a forecast. Last year's season was a hard one for Western Canadian freight in its own right, closing Highway 97 and straining the BC to Alberta corridors, and 2026 is starting drier still.

The Corridors That Hold BC Together

To understand why a single fire can ripple through an entire supply chain, you have to understand BC's geography. The Lower Mainland, home to Vancouver, Abbotsford and the busiest port in Canada, is separated from the rest of the province by mountains. Only a handful of highways cross them: Highway 1, the Trans-Canada through the Fraser Canyon; Highway 5, the Coquihalla; Highway 3, the Crowsnest; and Highway 99 to the north. The Coquihalla is the fastest and most heavily used commercial route, the spine of the Asia-Pacific Gateway, and the default lane for trucks heading to Kamloops, the Interior, Alberta and beyond.

The problem is that these routes are not really redundant. They run through the same dry, fire-prone valleys, often within sight of each other, so the same heat wave that closes one can threaten the next. When the Coquihalla goes down, Highway 1 and Highway 3 absorb the overflow, and when Highway 1 goes down too, as it did this weekend near Lytton, the alternatives get long and crowded in a hurry. Trucking carries the weight of this exposure because it carries the weight of the freight: roughly 72 percent of Canada's freight tonnage moves by truck, and BC's port trucking alone handled about 42 billion dollars in goods in 2022. When a corridor closes, that value does not stop needing to move. It just gets harder, slower and more expensive to move it.

What a Closure Actually Costs a Truck

A highway closure on a map looks like a red line. Inside the cab and on the invoice, it looks like this:

What 2021 and Jasper 2024 Taught Us

If you want to know how bad a corridor failure can get, BC has two recent case studies. The first was not even a fire. In November 2021, an atmospheric river severed all four highways out of the Lower Mainland at once, and the Coquihalla took the worst of it: more than 20 damaged sites over 130 kilometres and seven bridges destroyed or badly damaged. Highway 5 closed on November 14 and did not reopen to commercial traffic for 35 days, with full permanent repairs taking about 13 months. For a stretch in mid-November, there was not a single open road or rail route between Vancouver and the Interior, isolating a port that moves on the order of 550 million dollars of cargo a day. The rebuild bill climbed toward nine billion dollars.

The second was a fire, and it showed that the damage is not limited to roads. In July 2024 the wildfire that devastated Jasper also shut down CN's main transcontinental rail line, cutting rail access to the Ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert and backing up trains across Alberta, with roughly 25 reported stacked up around Kamloops alone. Highway 16, the Yellowhead, was cut as well. The lesson from both events is the same: in this part of the country, road, rail and port move freight through a few narrow corridors, and when one of those corridors fails, the disruption spreads far beyond the fire line. We have written before about how quickly these shocks ripple outward in our look at supply chain disruptions.

How Carriers and Shippers Should Plan

Wildfire risk cannot be eliminated, but it can be planned for. The carriers and shippers who come through fire season cleanest are the ones who treat closures as a near certainty rather than a surprise. A few practical moves:

How Keylink Keeps Freight Moving

Keylink is a BC-based, asset-based full truckload carrier, headquartered in Abbotsford right at the mouth of these corridors, so fire season is not an abstract risk for us. It is the road our drivers run. Because we operate our own trucks and dispatch our own fleet, we can reroute in real time rather than waiting on a chain of brokers, and we plan Interior and cross-border lanes during peak fire weeks with the alternates already mapped and buffer already built in.

That control also shapes how we communicate. When a corridor like the one near Lytton closes, our customers do not find out their freight is late from a tracking page that has gone quiet. They hear from us, with where the load is and how we are getting it there. A wildfire can change the map in an afternoon, but a load that has to reach a customer on the other side of the mountains still has to get there, and getting it there reliably when the easy route is gone is exactly the job. If you move freight through British Columbia this summer, it is worth knowing your carrier has a plan for the day the highway closes, because in 2026 that day is not hypothetical.

Sources and Further Reading